An unassuming yet potent novel about the power and possibilities of personal transformation after traumatic events.
A careful, reclusive family man becomes unhinged after a chance meeting with an aggressive seductress.
This fiction debut by a Southern California screenwriter offers interpersonal melodrama and complicated relationships. The story follows Terry Boyle, a conservative married man who repeatedly encounters curvaceous, aggressive, fearless Renee Patrick, owner of the local Hardware California supply store. Renee’s reputation as Porterville’s resident floozy and remorseless, brazen homewrecker has been well-established throughout the years: she’s a woman who doesn’t particularly enjoy the company of men outside of the bedroom and doesn’t believe in marriage because “she’d never seen one work.” Terry’s life at home with a depressed, unstable wife and 7-year-old daughter has become laborious, so making excuses to see Renee seems to breathe new life into his stagnant world. Though she’s depicted as an angry, insatiable man-eater, Renee soon emerges as a multifaceted character. She’s a horse owner who spends time in a barn compassionately tending to her stallion. And she eventually begins to come to terms with her present situation, her future, her critical mother, and a childhood spent with a sexually abusive father. All of these issues surface at a church service after the death of her mother when Renee admits to a desperate need to rehabilitate her image. Meanwhile, Terry’s paranoia about his job stability becomes a reality when he is let go from an insurance company. Aside from visiting his therapist, he embarks on a much-needed period of self-reflection. Midway through, Terry’s and Renee’s personal catharses overshadow the mounting sexual tension between them. This narrative element elevates the story from a raunchy seduction yarn to a deeper, more introspective work of fiction, despite an awkward revelation about Terry’s family that he has yet to emotionally process. Van De Yacht’s talents as a storyteller are solid and impressive. Well-structured, the appealing book delivers polished writing and multidimensional characters (Renee says of Terry: “His face had a haunted look. It was eerily reminiscent of the lost potential and unforgiving harshness of a mug shot, yet there was residual evidence suggesting he hadn’t always looked this way”). The novel’s conclusion, flush with the kind of redemptive overtones found in Christian fiction, should satisfy readers, as both Renee and Terry seem ready for renewal, forgiveness, and the blessings of a fresh start.
An unassuming yet potent novel about the power and possibilities of personal transformation after traumatic events.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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
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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