A dazzling collection of satisfying tales consistent in theme, dexterity, and impressive execution.
A volume offers sweet and savory short stories grounded by the human condition.
San Antonio poet and author Salinas bases his 40-tale collection primarily on his South Texas homeland, where characters deal with love, young adult angst and insecurity, death, and the bonds of family. The homespun opening story, “Places,” is a first-person–narrated winner about a divorced son mourning his mother’s death. In a family hobbled by the father’s sudden abandonment, the only saving grace appears when the protagonist’s estranged bachelor brother returns home. The interactions between fatherless brothers also populate other tales, like “Even-Steven,” in which two siblings discuss the life-changing “accident” that scarred them both. Simmering with anger and guilt, the brothers attempt a resolution while perched on the edge of a cliff. Straightforward and bare-knuckle, the author’s characters have no hidden agendas. Men consider women who have blond hair but brown eyes instead of blue to be “prisoners of predetermination”; White folks in South Texas comically dub themselves “white Mexican’t.” For the most part, these are stories about people for whom the struggle is very real. They may be short on cash, luck, and education, but they are rich in their experiences with life’s simple pleasures and the satisfactions of a good day’s work. Some tales veer off into their own worlds, as when a young man questions the identity of a trainee at a starship academy. The rest are indelibly human, best represented in the endearingly bittersweet first date at an IHOP between a nerd who does impressions and a community college “trailer-park girl.” Collectively, these stories represent life’s imperfections, and Salinas is skilled in mapping out the bones of his tales in an economy of pages. He is adept at cleverly outlining characters and their concerns while creating a variety of situations that will engulf readers. The drawback to this writerly flair is that readers will often find themselves at the finales wanting more, as in “Coke Machine,” the tale of a mall janitor assisting a shopper obsessed with a wall that she believes conceals a vault. The same can be said of the title story, involving a young, restless, likable insurance worker whose magical thinking seems to be the only thing giving him hope for the future.
A dazzling collection of satisfying tales consistent in theme, dexterity, and impressive execution.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73617-796-9
Page Count: 278
Publisher: San Antonio Review
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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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