by Courtney Cole ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 17, 2018
An intense but stunningly hopeful story about drug addiction, loss, and relationships.
A teenager full of promise succumbs to drugs and ends up fighting for his life in this heart-wrenching, suspenseful tale.
The book opens as Beck is being rushed to the emergency room. He showed up on his mother’s doorstep after having disappeared for two straight months and immediately collapsed from a drug overdose. The doctors put Beck into a medically induced coma and tell his mother, Natalie, that they will wait 24 hours for the swelling in his brain to decrease. Until they bring him out of the coma, they won’t know whether he will survive. Most of the story is told as Natalie is at the hospital, waiting to see whether her son will live or die. The narration alternates between the history that led Beck to this moment and the present, when his mother is praying for his survival. We learn that Beck was visiting colleges with his dad when they got into a car accident that resulted in his father’s death. Following the sudden loss of her husband, Natalie spirals into debilitating depression, leaving 18-year-old Beck with the responsibility of looking after his much younger siblings and paying the household bills. As Natalie’s depression drags on, Beck’s guilt at surviving the accident increases, and his own coping skills decline. He helps himself to Natalie’s Xanax, which takes the edge off, but only at first. Soon this superstar athlete is regularly smoking pot. But the marijuana, too, ceases to adequately dull Beck’s memories and grief. When his buddy hands him some heroin, Beck decides to go for it. Before long, he is completely hooked and slipping into an increasingly dangerous lifestyle of needles, drug dealers, and violence. This riveting story highlights the unrelenting force of addiction and the havoc it can wreak on any family. Through accessible and absorbing prose, Cole (The Nocte Trilogy, 2015, etc.) tells an important tale full of complex characters and nuanced family drama.
An intense but stunningly hopeful story about drug addiction, loss, and relationships.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8452-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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by Christina Lauren ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2018
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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