A Southern saga creates a fully realized world with characters who are easy to get to know and root for; it’s a comfortable...
This final installment of a trilogy, set in Somerville, Kentucky, offers a slice of small-town life.
The narrative follows former flight attendant Annie Taylor and her grandmother Beulah as they prepare for the holidays and Annie’s wedding. There are everyday snags—trying to arrange events around work duties, minor rifts with friends, medical hardships. Everyone knows one another in Somerville. And just about everyone is connected to everyone else, which makes life both familiar and fraught. Beulah’s old friend Betty Gibson tries to steal the community potluck dinner out from under her, and it seems they are done for good until Betty suffers a heart attack and Beulah helps to arrange for her care. Annie’s job at the nursing home is snatched from her, the second one she’s lost in a year. That makes it easier to schedule her wedding to Jake Wilder, her childhood friend, but it also means money will be tighter as he tries to get a farm started while working for the bank. Plans are further complicated when they decide to get married in Italy, where they recently discovered long-lost relatives. Annie’s mother died young, and her father has been mostly absent. Since he lives in Spain, she hopes he’ll make the ceremony, but that seems like a long shot. There are tragedies big and small in Correll’s (Guarded, 2015, etc.) novel. People die; opportunities vanish; old friends argue. But the effective, overarching themes are love and perseverance. Annie and Beulah head the strong, complex cast. Adjusting to adversity with dignity and an open heart, if not always an open mind, Annie recognizes that she will no longer travel the globe once she settles down. An old boyfriend provides a bit of agitation in her decision-making. Beulah, who has enjoyed a fairly settled life, must now meet new family members. She elects to open her home to poor souls with nowhere else to go. Correll displays a talent for evoking all the little details that make this town come alive: relatives who have a cornerstone at the local church and the damage a shepherd’s staff on Beulah’s Nativity set sustains when a feral cat gets loose in the house.
A Southern saga creates a fully realized world with characters who are easy to get to know and root for; it’s a comfortable place worthy of a return trip.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 283
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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