Three British women have been best friends since their days at Oxford…and then there were two.
Nancy is the beautiful, rich blonde who is cheating on her husband; dumpy Eleanor is married to her career of humanitarian work overseas; Mary is the harried mother of three whose professor husband can barely manage to stop by the house between affairs. As the novel opens, Nancy has turned up dead after a rendezvous with her mystery lover, of whom no one knows a thing. Or just one small, possibly false, thing—she told Eleanor his first name was David. Hall’s fifth novel takes a refreshing approach to the multiple-narrator thriller, eschewing at least two tired gambits: back-and-forth chapters between two points of view and tricking the reader by having a narrator withhold information. So thank you for that, Ms. Hall. The first third of the book, in which the crime is discovered and investigated, belongs to Eleanor, whose grief drives her to some uncharacteristic—and not very nice—behavior. The second part moves back in time and gives us Nancy’s view of things prior to her demise. “I love what every man has always loved about you,” says her lover. “Your perfection.” Struggling most of her life with depression, Nancy certainly doesn’t feel perfect. What’s more, she wants out of this affair. The final section is Mary’s, and it culminates in a satisfying solution to the crime plus an improbably happy ending, given that we’re three corpses in. The murder-mystery aspect of the book is handled well, but the psychological novel is a little on the slow side, with much ruminating on the part of each character, and the Betty Friedan–era feminist themes—career vs. family, the awfulness of housework, the constriction of traditional gender roles—feel oddly dated.
Good bone structure.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-27258-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
77
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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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK TO SCREEN
Sure to enchant even those who have never played a video game in their lives, with instant cult status for those who have.
17
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The adventures of a trio of genius kids united by their love of gaming and each other.
When Sam Masur recognizes Sadie Green in a crowded Boston subway station, midway through their college careers at Harvard and MIT, he shouts, “SADIE MIRANDA GREEN. YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY!” This is a reference to the hundreds of hours—609 to be exact—the two spent playing “Oregon Trail” and other games when they met in the children’s ward of a hospital where Sam was slowly and incompletely recovering from a traumatic injury and where Sadie was secretly racking up community service hours by spending time with him, a fact which caused the rift that has separated them until now. They determine that they both still game, and before long they’re spending the summer writing a soon-to-be-famous game together in the apartment that belongs to Sam's roommate, the gorgeous, wealthy acting student Marx Watanabe. Marx becomes the third corner of their triangle, and decades of action ensue, much of it set in Los Angeles, some in the virtual realm, all of it riveting. A lifelong gamer herself, Zevin has written the book she was born to write, a love letter to every aspect of gaming. For example, here’s the passage introducing the professor Sadie is sleeping with and his graphic engine, both of which play a continuing role in the story: “The seminar was led by twenty-eight-year-old Dov Mizrah....It was said of Dov that he was like the two Johns (Carmack, Romero), the American boy geniuses who'd programmed and designed Commander Keen and Doom, rolled into one. Dov was famous for his mane of dark, curly hair, wearing tight leather pants to gaming conventions, and yes, a game called Dead Sea, an underwater zombie adventure, originally for PC, for which he had invented a groundbreaking graphics engine, Ulysses, to render photorealistic light and shadow in water.” Readers who recognize the references will enjoy them, and those who don't can look them up and/or simply absorb them. Zevin’s delight in her characters, their qualities, and their projects sprinkles a layer of fairy dust over the whole enterprise.
Sure to enchant even those who have never played a video game in their lives, with instant cult status for those who have.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32120-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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