Engrossing, intricately embroidered, and refreshingly original.
In this novel by Anonymous an educator in Washington, D.C., stumbles into a strange world that promises to reveal literary secrets.
As this story opens, the poet Walt Whitman is saying a final farewell to his beloved Rock Creek in the nation’s capital. It’s the summer of 1864, and Walt has spent the past few years of the Civil War comforting the sick and dying in Washington’s Armory Square Hospital. Walt, who’s emotionally broken and largely unknown at this point in his career, stumbles upon Ezra, a former slave, and June, a high society girl, who live together in the wilderness as a two-person “army of poetry lovers.” They claim to communicate with the spirit of the poet John Keats, who, they say, lives in Ezra’s soul, and they pledge to make sure that Walt is remembered as a great poet. The novel jumps to the present day to introduce narrator Jack, a community college teacher and aficionado of Keats’ work who finds himself broke and sitting in Rock Creek Park. There, he encounters an enigmatic stranger known as “Cowboy” who, along with his gang, claims to protect a “secret world” in the woods that Walt created. As Jack is led further into Cowboy’s esoteric community, its mystery is slowly revealed, which makes for compelling reading—particularly in how it forges a link to Ezra and June’s story. The novel is effectively a playground for philosophical conversation, and the author carefully and convincingly captures Whitman’s sensibilities as both a flâneur and a transcendentalist: “My undistracted spirit could pour itself into any living miracle I came upon. I could inhabit ordinary working people, the pit of a peach, a powerful sunrise—anything.” The novel is also steeped in literary history, as when it refers to Richard Brautigan’s 1968 novel, In Watermelon Sugar, in which “people lived in quaint, little shacks in a mind-bending forest full of magical creeks,” offering a distorted reflection of Cowboy’s own perception of Rock Creek Park. Readers with a limited knowledge of poetry, particularly that of Whitman and Keats, may struggle to engage with this book, but others will find it an enjoyably weird and imaginative literary journey.
Engrossing, intricately embroidered, and refreshingly original.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Oakwood Terrace Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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
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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