Business schemes and on-again, off-again romances will keep readers going as long as they can overlook a few unpleasant...
In Kennedy’s debut novel, a shipping magnate and his daughter grapple with an age-old question—what’s more important: wealth or love?
John Wolcott grew up as an orphan in the dockyards of England in the early 19th century, but now he’s the rich, confident head of Wolcott Shipping. Jilted on his wedding day 25 years ago, he’s also a bachelor who doesn’t dare give a woman power over his heart again. Nonetheless, when he meets the beautiful Mary Melbourne, he feels that he must have her. Although she senses that something is off, Mary agrees to marriage in the hope that her passion will grow. It doesn’t, but the two still manage to have a daughter, Louisa. Later, at the age of 16, she’s an intelligent girl who’s grown up in the lap of luxury, but all she really wants is to please her distant father. So when Wolcott, hoping to grow his company, sets her up with a young businessman, she agrees. Louisa doesn’t love James Elliot, though, and he’s in love with someone else, a kindhearted woman below his station. However, both have ulterior motives that push them to see the union through. Meanwhile, Louisa meets an ambitious man climbing the ranks of the Royal Navy with whom she feels an odd connection. Finally, Elliot’s soft-spoken, mysterious older brother enters the picture, and his presence threatens to unravel Wolcott’s well-laid plans. Kennedy’s debut novel is, on the surface, part romance, part historical fiction, but it’s also a story of self-discovery. Overall, it’s a quick-paced, action-packed read. That said, it takes a long time to develop reader sympathy for its main characters. Wolcott, for example, is deeply unlikable, Louisa is a rather spoiled girl not above using “a well-placed tantrum” to get what she wants, and Elliot is a ruthless factory boss. It’s Wolcott’s wife, Mary, stuck in a loveless marriage but committed to making sure her daughter doesn’t make the same mistakes, whom readers will root for. A series of fortuitous events eventually sets everyone on the right tracks, but this result may come too late for some readers.
Business schemes and on-again, off-again romances will keep readers going as long as they can overlook a few unpleasant characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 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
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