A vivid and timely depiction of the sentience of elephants and the cruelty of ivory poaching.
An aged African elephant bull travels from Zambia to his homeland in Kenya’s Tsavo West National Park to say his final goodbyes in a debut novel that melds reality and fantasy.
It is 1964, and Kamau Matiba, a young teenage Kenyan, is taking his rite-of-passage walkabout when he hears gunshots. A local band of especially vicious ivory poachers has just slaughtered an entire herd of elephants. When Kamau investigates, he discovers a 2-year-old elephant calf lying beside the body of his mother. The detached blade of a machete is protruding from the wounded animal’s forehead. When Kamau gently strokes him, the calf opens his eyes and looks at him. He is the lone survivor of the massacre. Kamau knows of a place where he can find help, Salisbury Hill Farm, just outside the refuge park. There he enlists the aid of Russell Hathaway, a hunting guide, and his wife, Jean, who runs a small, wild-animal orphanage for helpless offspring. Together, they nurse the calf back to health and name him Anaishi, or “Ishi,” for “He lives.” So begins a tender, sometimes heartbreaking saga that spans three continents, five decades, and a more than 1,000-mile journey by the elephant back to the Tsavo wildlife refuge, his birthplace. The narrative consists of two parallel tales, one tracing the lives of the Hathaway family (Russell, Jean, daughter Amanda, and son Terence) and the other tracking the events in Ishi’s life. They are told through two distinct voices—one, a third-person narrator, the other the “voice” of Ishi, the narrative’s only fully developed character. The book follows the major events in the lives of the “two-leggers,” as Ishi calls them, but never quite makes you feel them. Ishi, however, expresses a depth of love and emotion that is sure to bring more than a few tears. He describes the pain the herd feels when they lose clan members to the poachers: “Every season we would return to the places where our friends had fallen and visit their bones, turning them over and over, remembering their owner, and hoping to find a life force in there somewhere.”
A vivid and timely depiction of the sentience of elephants and the cruelty of ivory poaching.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.
A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.
Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ (Wilder, 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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