Strong characterizations and realistic relationships help make this shark tale a satisfying, accomplished read.
A quest for vengeance after a tragic death turns a ragtag group of strangers into a family in Burnette’s (Christmas in Sunny California, 2011, etc.) adventurous narrative.
Off the coast of Florida, an older surfer places himself between a young couple and a bull shark; he saves them, but he’s fatally mauled in the process. In a boardroom in Maryland, an executive at the top of his game finds himself cut out of the company, adrift with plenty of money but no purpose. Soon, an independent truck driver reads a newspaper at a Florida diner one morning and finds the name of the surfer, a fellow soldier from the Vietnam War whom he hadn’t seen for decades. Driven by various needs—revenge, satisfaction for a wasted life, the desire to begin anew—the executive and truck driver, along with a pair of researchers who’ve fallen on hard times, hunt the bull shark that killed a man who’d been forgotten by the world. Burnette’s story is heavily indebted to Jaws, which Burnette makes explicit with repeated callbacks to the 1975 Steven Spielberg movie and the original 1974 Peter Benchley novel. He tells it with confidence, allowing the action to rise from his nuanced characterizations rather than by forcing plot contrivances on readers. Although the hunt for the massive bull shark is the characters’ primary motivation, their work and travel together gives them each new purposes and helps them bond as a makeshift family. Each character, from the Vietnam veterans who served with the dead surfer to the 17-year-old girl who pulls the surfer from the ocean, has plausible traits and fears, and Burnette writes with a surety that allows the people to drive the story. This confidence extends to the author’s use of the third-person viewpoint, which lets him provide information that the characters never learn. This strategy further develops the novel’s world and provides the groundwork for later explorations.
Strong characterizations and realistic relationships help make this shark tale a satisfying, accomplished read.Pub Date: March 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4787-4021-6
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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