A fun read when the story slows down and allows the characters to engage with one another.
A Victorian theater provides a home for outcasts in Conroy’s (But from Thine Eyes, 2017, etc.) historical novel.
Homosexuality is illegal in late-19th-century London, so handsome young actor Jeremy O’Connell must keep his relationship with fellow thespian Tommy Quinn a secret outside of their social circle. Jeremy and Tommy are preparing for a small production of Much Ado About Nothing when ingénue Katherine Stewart arrives to play Hero, fresh from her family’s traveling variety act and heartbroken that her sweetheart, Simon Camden, is leaving London. Simon asks Jeremy to look after Katherine, and Jeremy grudgingly provides the naïve actress with acting lessons and half a bed in his tiny flat. Jeremy’s annoyance with Katherine gradually transforms into platonic love, though, and the two settle into a fake marriage, living as man and wife while each pursues his or her own affairs. Tommy is later imprisoned for sexual misconduct, but Jeremy and Katherine become theatrical celebrities, starting their own prominent acting company and teaching drama classes that attract starry-eyed student Rory Cookingham. These characters, however, only occupy about half of the book. Other chapters focus on Elisa Roundtree, a beautiful, isolated teenage girl desperately trying to escape an impending, forced marriage to a brutal man. Her plight draws the attention of her school’s smitten new art teacher, who tries to help her. The characters’ stories often feel oddly unrelated to one another, and it’s especially unclear, until quite late, how Elisa’s plotline relates to the actors’. The actors’ chapters often present intriguing setups. However, they rush through them; Jeremy’s feelings toward Katherine, for example, mutate from annoyance to adoration, but more through summary than scene work. Their scenes also lack a sustained conflict, as the author seems more focused on setting up Book II than offering compelling plotlines in Book I. The characters tend to be underdeveloped, overall, but they’re still enjoyable when given good plotlines. Elisa’s storyline, for instance, is far more engaging than the thespians’; she becomes increasingly desperate as her wedding day approaches, experimenting with both acquiescence and defiance.
A fun read when the story slows down and allows the characters to engage with one another.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 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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