A grisly thriller that will satisfy fans of serial killers, though it might mislead readers into thinking it’s a YA novel...
In Eve’s dark debut, 16-year-old Cosette Hugo finds herself the victim of a high school bully, but after she kills her bully’s rapist and is wracked with guilt, she decides that the best way to die is to get herself killed.
Cosette doesn’t like her life. She lives with her mom in a beige apartment, her dad and his new trophy wife ignore her, her war hero brother was killed in a car accident, and a bully, Hilda, is making her life miserable. Cosette doesn’t think she’s attractive, strong, or confident; that’s nothing, however, compared with how she feels after she stumbles across Hilda being sexually assaulted one night. In a flood of adrenaline, Cosette scares away two of the attackers and kills the third. Afterward, she feels so guilty that she considers suicide, but she decides it would hurt her friends and family too much. So Cosette formulates a plan: she’ll find one or both of Hilda’s remaining attackers and let them kill her. At least, that’s the plan until she accidentally runs into a drug addict who attacks her, and Cosette kicks him to death. After murdering twice, Cosette is apparently hooked; she stumbles into one dangerous situation after another, but instead of feeling weak and afraid, she begins slitting throats and chopping up bodies. Eve is a strong writer whose prose makes it easy to get sucked in, yet the plot may turn some readers off. What appears to be a story about bullying and teen suicide takes an abrupt (at times, not wholly believable) left turn when Cosette becomes a psychotic vigilante serial killer who gets sexually aroused by murder. When she says things like, “He holds my neck and clenches my hair, forcing me to bend to his demands. It’s painful and violent. And I love it,” it feels as if two types of books—YA about bullying and depression and thriller in the vein of Dexter or Fifty Shades of Grey—are warring for dominance. The two halves don’t entirely fit together.
A grisly thriller that will satisfy fans of serial killers, though it might mislead readers into thinking it’s a YA novel when it decidedly is not.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1942366027
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Spikenard Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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