Gruesome, funny, jam-packed, sharp as baby teeth.
A tony preschool is plunged into chaos when a beloved teacher is murdered during—or because of?—a disturbing outbreak of bloodsucking among her otherwise adorable students.
What could be a more perfect and hilariously dark metaphor for privileged modern motherhood than Baker’s invention of “pediatric Renfield’s syndrome”? In Miss Erin Ollie’s class at the usually perfect Little Academy in Texas, many of the 4-year-olds have taken the age-appropriate problem of biting a step further: They bite for blood. Particularly, they crave the blood of their mothers, who decide collectively that this is a need like any other—although, admittedly, grosser and creepier—and that it will pass and, in the meantime, must be met. Attachment parenting at its finest! Any parent who has imagined that their young children are draining the life out of them will both get the joke and feel the (piercing) pain. When Miss Ollie turns up dead in the school supply closet, everyone wonders: Was one of the newly vampiric children involved? Three different moms—Rhea, Mary Beth, and Darby—provide rotating perspectives. Each has secret information about the day of the murder, and all three make misguided decisions designed to protect their kids. In keeping with the ruthless satirical tone, though, what they want to protect their kids from most isn’t bodily harm—it’s a bad reputation. Red herrings abound and clues are dispensed tantalizingly. The building social tension is so good that the murder mystery can feel almost unnecessary. Will it come back to bite readers in the end? In the meantime, Baker limns the fascinating ways parents in a community can be simultaneously at odds with and bonded to each other and how the pressure of parenthood makes crisis hard to define.
Gruesome, funny, jam-packed, sharp as baby teeth.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781250839787
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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
It’s just as exhausting as it sounds, but it may be the most ambitious spy novel you’ve ever read.
What happens when an eminent mystery novelist collaborates with an award-winning journalist on a spy thriller? Pretty much everything you can imagine.
While food blogger Alice Li is in retreat from her overbearing mother, famous Chinese dissident Vivien Li, in a restaurant bathroom, the alarm goes off. And not just the fire alarm, but every alarm in the city, the country, and around the world. Their triggering is clearly an act of terrorism, and the silencing of all those alarms, which comes as suddenly and inexplicably as their screeching, is anything but reassuring. Vivien spirits her daughter off to the White House, where Grant McAllister, the director of National Intelligence, informs Alice that her friend and fellow blogger Liam Palmer has just been fished from the Hong Kong harbor. McAllister and Alan Zhou, head of the China Mission Center, are convinced Liam knew something about those alarms, and President Fraser Pardington is determined to do whatever he can to prevent a sequel. He fails, of course, and the second act of global terrorism is even more disastrous than the first. All the president’s men and women initially believe the threat comes from the Chinese government, and Chinese President Chen Jiayang thinks the Americans might be behind it. Alice and Vivien race around the globe to track down the culprit, and what they find will knit together the fates of Alice’s family, the U.S. and China, and the history of the world as we know it.
It’s just as exhausting as it sounds, but it may be the most ambitious spy novel you’ve ever read.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9781250412522
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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