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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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