This noir-shadowed melodrama’s realistic characters will hold readers’ interest.
In Shelburne’s (Clemmie, 2012, etc.) novel, a man reluctantly returns to his small, Southern hometown for his estranged mother’s funeral and becomes inextricably caught up in the lives of his former childhood friends.
There’s “never a dull moment out here in the sticks,” a Martinsville, Tennessee, storekeeper observes in this fast-paced novel. It opens with a harrowing drunk-driving accident involving a carful of long-separated former friends. Matthew is a divorced man who’s anxious to return to his fledgling Denver law practice and bemoans being “stuck here in Podunk Junction with all its misfits”; Ivy League–educated Bernie is a now-conservative family man with a lucrative dry-cleaning business; and Joe Bob is a mechanic who lives in a trailer park. They pile into a car after a night of drinking with Joe Bob driving, and they accidentally hit and kill a local man. The trio decides to “let sleeping dogs lie” and not report the accident—a decision that casts a long shadow over their reunion. The narrative takes eccentric twists and turns, including a bizarre encounter with a snake-handling cult and a pregnant young “gypsy” whom the men find in a cabin. Although the book’s title suggests a Steven Seagal–style action-thriller, the narrative itself is more akin to the dysfunctional-family dramas of Sam Shepard or Tracy Letts. Matthew, for example, struggles to find closure regarding his feelings toward his small-town roots and his emotionally distant parent (“I wanted to be on my way, back to my real life,” he reflects. “I would bury Martinsville, Tennessee along with my mother”). Add to the mix Matthew’s increasingly unbalanced ex-wife, who shows up seeking to reconcile; soap-opera–like developments involving his angry, embittered sister; and a discovery of infidelity, and readers will begin to believe the maxim that you can’t go home again—or at least, you shouldn’t. Although the dramatic payoff of the drunk-driving incident is anticlimactic, the dialogue could use more snap, and some broadly drawn situations could use more authenticity, this book is anything but predictable. In a small town where “unpleasant things got swept under rugs,” Shelburne allows for the possibility of renewal and redemption.
This noir-shadowed melodrama’s realistic characters will hold readers’ interest.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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