The spark of a story about the challenges of a creative life fails to catch flame.
A young man wrestles with his artistic soul at the retreat of an enigmatic art patron.
In 2017, as he reaches his mid-30s, writer Solomon Fields has abandoned a promising journalistic career for the financial security of a spirit-crushing job in the advertising industry and a relationship with a young woman named Charity whose life is bound up in the striving of materialist culture. He also feels trapped between the clashing worldviews of his maternal grandmother, Lina, a Holocaust survivor and advocate for seizing the pleasures of life and art, as she did after fleeing Berlin for New York City in 1940, and his mother, Charlotte, a Marxist-turned-conservative and passionate defender of Israel. At the invitation of a woman named Plume, he travels to a tropical island where her employer, the mysterious Sebastian Light, has created a haven for artists he calls The Coded Garden. When Sol arrives, he meets people with names like Crystalline and Siddhartha, at first observing and then participating in the retreat’s curious rituals, including one bacchanalian evening in a sweat lodge, all the while fending off persistent questions by the residents about whether he intends to write about them. There are recurring conversations about the meaning of art and frequent flashbacks to moments in Sol’s relationship with Lina, one that’s much closer than his with Charlotte. Though the questions Maksik raises are provocative ones, the novel too often has a static feel as Sol struggles to solve the riddle of whether Light is a sincere patron of aspiring artists, a pretentious charlatan, or something much more sinister. While the portrait of Sol’s colorful and outspoken grandmother is vibrant and entertaining, Light and his acolytes in The Coded Garden too often feel more like devices for advancing competing arguments than fully realized fictional characters.
The spark of a story about the challenges of a creative life fails to catch flame.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-751-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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