While this coming-of-age tale skillfully taps into nerd culture, the hero remains problematic.
In this debut YA novel, a tween boy in the 1970s becomes obsessed with collecting comic books.
In 1973, 11-year-old Barry Schwartz enjoys reading and drawing comics, especially The Amazing Spider-Man, but his true passion ignites when he discovers collecting them. Barry learns about condition, value, and the satisfaction of completing a perfect sequence—made possible through specialty comic-book stores, where he can find back numbers. Barry’s grades slip as he ignores homework in favor of his all-consuming fixation, and he doesn’t relate well to other kids: “I realized that my only friends were the Hulk on my bedroom wall and my collection of comics.” At nearly 13, Barry begins helping out at a comic-book store, where he learns much from older fans: “I absorbed the depths of facts, tales, and personal trials of the fringe adult world, a kind of cult bridging childhood with adulthood. This was my world of comics.” But strangely, after he completes his Spider-Man collection, Barry’s fervor fades. With girls and high school on the horizon, he becomes ready to leave one world and enter another. Schulman deftly delves into a subculture familiar to everyone today thanks to the ascendance of superhero movies and TV shows like The Big Bang Theory. Barry is fairly insightful about what draws him to comics and collecting—fantasies of power, a sense of purpose—but less about himself. He seems to blame having few friends on not fitting into any clique, but he is superior and cold, dropping buddies who don’t meet his collecting standards. Barry describes a comic-store patron as “hard on the eyes….Yet, she had the self-esteem to laugh giddily.” The idea that she should have to earn the right to laugh by being attractive says nothing good about Barry. His collecting often seems a chilly fanaticism as well. In the end, although readers may be sympathetic to his concerns, Barry isn’t a very appealing character.
While this coming-of-age tale skillfully taps into nerd culture, the hero remains problematic.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Best Seller Publications, LLC
Review Posted Online: June 20, 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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