A suspenseful, page-turning paranormal romance.
An academic at the University of Virginia confronts her father’s death and a supernatural threat in this novel by Amato (King Peso, 2016, etc.).
History professor Brodie Macbeth is planning her breakup with her wealthy, cold colleague Stanton Sloane when she receives a phone call from the Boston police. They tell her that her father and department chair, Wallace Macbeth, is dead after falling from a hotel window, an apparent suicide. Soon, she’s puzzling over unusual requests in her father’s will, which ask her to move into the house she grew up in, to keep her dad’s longtime car registration active, to read his entire library, and to deliver a painting to her aunt in Edinburgh, Scotland. When she meets attractive U.S. Marine veteran Joe Birnam on the international flight, it renews her resolve to end her relationship with Stanton. Meanwhile, Stanton is furious that she chose to keep her father’s house rather than donating it to the university in order to help his career. In Scotland, Brodie is troubled by nightmares as well as by faraway unrest in the history department, so her relationship with Joe initially stalls. Joe’s own insecurities concerning his war wounds contribute to the problem, but once they overcome these melodramatic conflicts, their romance flourishes. When Brodie discovers the shocking, supernatural cause of her nightmares, it imperils not only her relationship with Joe, but also both their lives. The author expertly interweaves historical facts, drawn from the books Brodie is reading, into the character’s bad dreams. Both Brodie and Joe are relatable characters; indeed, he’s so perfectly flawed that many readers may fall in love with him, too. For a brilliant academic, though, Brodie is slow to recognize the incredible coincidence of both her father and his publisher dying the same way in a very short time span. (That said, she is distracted by conniving fellow history professor Jack Hull and the jocular new department head, Donald Pedder, whose seamless entry into the department seems too good to be true.) Truly, the novel’s only flaws are the contrived conflicts that keep Brodie and Joe apart for too long.
A suspenseful, page-turning paranormal romance.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 327
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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