In Jacobson’s debut novel, a precocious boy from a broken family feels God’s influence on his life.
The novel opens, memorably, with a 6-year-old boy receiving the Holy Spirit at a revival meeting. From the start, it’s clear that this is no ordinary child, as he’s both unusually serious and uncommonly gifted. But his dysfunctional family could derail his mission to serve Jesus: His father is, by turns, absent or violent, and the family’s frequent moves mean that the boy is often the new kid in school. It’s not until page 20 that readers learn the boy’s name (Ches); other immediate family members remain “the dad,” “the mother,” “the eldest brother” and so on. This anonymity indicates Ches’ solipsism, and suggests that his is an archetypal hero’s quest. However, it also allows readers to remain detached from the characters. Ches’ coming-of-age doesn’t follow a smooth path; he may be a genius—reading Nietzsche at age 12—and a surfing phenom, but drugs and crime also beckon him. Italicized chapter-ending passages reveal that the entire story is a series of flashbacks, and that Ches is currently hiding in a church utility room, either having a breakdown or an epiphany. However, his self-psychoanalysis seems far-fetched for an adolescent: “He pushed the paranoia back by reminding himself of his current victim status.…This thought sectionalized the guilt.” Jacobson is clearly fascinated by how people speak, and he creates distinctive voices, some in dialect, throughout the novel. He convincingly renders a Southern preacher’s twang, a teacher’s Brooklyn accent and Ches’ grandmother’s Louisianan drawl, even if they can be challenging to read—as when the preacher says, “[S]ayith Gawd, ‘I whill powur out maa speeritupon awl falesh in the layst days’!” At one point, when Ches attends a Christian interdenominational conference, Jacobson transcribes a panel discussion on glossolalia and Trinitarianism. Again, the individual voices emerge beautifully, but the scene seems irrelevant, as do various asides discussing the Trinity, as the Oneness Pentecostal church is held up as a bastion of orthodoxy. This theme, particularly in combination with the author’s mockery of Ches’ liberal humanist and feminist professors, makes the novel feel like a Trojan horse, conveying conspiracy theories and religious dogma inside a somewhat aimless plot.
A skillfully written novel, undermined by fundamentalist propaganda.
Pub Date: July 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1480809031
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2014
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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