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
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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