UNDER SONORAN SKIES

Name: UNDER SONORAN SKIES
Author: Bill Black

PROSE AND POETRY FROM THE HIGH DESERT

by Bill Black Susan Cosby-Patton Jeanne Burrows-Johnson Kay Lesh Patricia Noble Larry Sakin ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 20, 2011

A scattershot and thematically confusing collection.

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Six Arizona-based authors present an anthology of poetry, essays and short fiction from their collective works.

Covering topics as diverse as the craft of writing, relationships, aging and even “Business, Culture and Society,” this compendium showcases the work of six writers hailing from Tucson, Ariz. Divided into 11 sections, their material is indexed as “General Essays,” “Historical Essays,” “Reflective Essays,” “Poetry” and “Short Stories.” But these varied forms and voices don’t always blend into a unified whole. Noble’s reflective essays, in particular, seem out of place; with titles like “Clearing the Deck for Success,” “How to Be a Millionaire” and “How to Be Really, Truly Well,” each essay reads like a chapter lifted from a self-help manual encouraging readers to “Say YES to Life” and “Say YES to Creativity.” Burrows-Johnson’s historical essays are interesting, if not thorough; her “Early History of Tucson and Her Cemeteries” never mentions the beautiful Binghampton Cemetery, established in 1899 in the Catalina Foothills and named Tucson’s best cemetery in 2007 by Tucson Weekly. General essays cover everything from bringing home a new cat (“Joshua Finds a Home,” Cosby-Patton) to putting up with a retired husband (“Retirement,” Lesh). Even the politcal makes an appearance in Sakin’s “A Declaration of Complete Independence.” Sakin also offers up a polemic blaming most societal ills on Starbucks in “Addled.” The pieces are generally quite brief, somewhat humorous and fairly casual. They often read more like blog entries than the sort of well-developed essays fans of the form expect to find in places like Best American Essays. The strongest section in the collection is the poetry, especially that of Cosby-Patton and her “Homage to My Thighs,” which pays homage to Clifton’s “Homage to My Hips,” and “As a Jewel in the Crown,” which asks for “a tried angel / an angel whose silver-stranded / tangled hair / slips beneath a tarnished halo.” Ultimately, this collection would have been more cohesive and successful if the authors had chosen to focus on a particular theme or genre.

A scattershot and thematically confusing collection.

Pub Date: July 20, 2011

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 230

Publisher: Imaginings Press

Review Posted Online: May 11, 2012

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.