A bittersweet novel about growing up and chasing dreams.
Two friends try to leave their rough childhoods behind in C.O.B’s (Words and Graphics—A Collection of Works, 2012, etc.) wistful bildungsroman.
Best friends Gary and Lincoln live for the hours after their parents have gone to bed, when they can sneak onto the roof and watch magical shapes and colors shoot across the sky. During the daytime, though, their lives are harder: From Lincoln’s drug dealer father to marital problems for Gary’s parents, adolescence is hard on the two boys, and they find themselves longing to escape. When a bully at school and family problems at home start to push the boys too far, they hatch a plan to build a rocket ship and leave once and for all. The boys are excited about their plan, and it seems as though not even Lincoln’s waning innocence will be able to destroytheir magic wish—until word of their plan gets out at school, and they suddenly find themselves besieged with requests to join in their adventure. Softhearted Gary is sympathetic to the requests, but Lincoln’s upbringing has hardened him, and he’s too afraid of failure to risk letting other kids join in. When a peculiar old shopkeeper warns them that their friendship is the only thing that will allow the rocket ship to work, Lincoln knows their time is running out. Suddenly, what once seemed like a surefire plan has become daunting, and Lincoln is in danger of losing the person who matters most. Tender and perceptive, this heartfelt coming-of-age novel is rife with all the pain and confusion of early adolescence. With their selfish innocence and shortsighted desire to make themselves feel good, Gary, Lincoln and their classmates could have stepped out of the hallway of any junior high school, yet the magical shapes and colors in the sky and the ability to make wishesgive this touching story just enough magic to lift it away from the humdrum world of middle school reality. However, while the magic is pleasantly subtle, readers are left in the dark about its exact mechanisms and limits, which can leave the plot twists feeling more fuzzy and confusing than satisfyingly enchanted.
A bittersweet novel about growing up and chasing dreams.Pub Date: May 19, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Grey Line Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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