A sober, personable tale about the complexities of sexual abuse and its aftermath.
Namkung (The Things We Tell Ourselves, 2015, etc.) presents a novel about a predatory English teacher and the journalists who seek to stop him.
Caryn Rodgers is an undergraduate at the University of Southern California and an intern at the Los Angeles Daily. She’s the daughter of a beauty queen and a diplomat, and her family is wealthy beyond imagination; she didn’t even know how to use a washing machine before she went to college. But her life hasn’t always been idyllic. Six years ago, during her sophomore year at the prestigious Windemere School for Girls, she found herself the target of unwanted advances from her English teacher, Dr. Gregory Copeland, who’s a beloved, longtime member of the faculty. Caryn, with the support of her boss, Jane March, decides to run a personal essay about her experience in the Daily. Her essay, “My Tenth-Grade Teacher Claims He Fell in Love With Me,” winds up causing quite a stir, and other Windemere alumnae come out of the woodwork with their own stories about Copeland. Caryn receives plenty of negative attention, as well, from Copeland’s defenders. Will there be enough evidence for a case, and will Windemere ever admit any wrongdoing? The story progresses quickly, and although some readers may find it difficult to relate to the protagonist’s wealth, other characters of other socio-economic classes help to round out the narrative. It’s through the stories of these characters that more sinister details emerge; for example, the vodka-fueled and heavily tattooed Sasha Sokoloff provides a thorough and disturbing account of her own past with Copeland. Sasha may seem like a familiar character type—a reckless, emotionally scarred beauty bouncing around Los Angeles—but readers do get the opportunity to understand where her pain comes from. A budding romance for Jane doesn’t add much to the plot; indeed, the journalist mainly just serves as a conduit for the victims’ stories. But the details and personalities of the victims, and the many risks that they face in coming forward, ultimately make the book a worthwhile read.
A sober, personable tale about the complexities of sexual abuse and its aftermath.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Griffith Moon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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