Heartbreaking, occasionally humorous, and powerful, with an ending not really satisfying but certainly lingering.
Short story writer Perlman debuts his first novel, a beautifully written, complex intergenerational drama that examines the ways family relationships shift when trust is broken.
Helen, Georgia, a small, upscale mountain town, is the setting for a Christmas/New Year’s gathering of the daughters (Sammy, Rachel, and Lottie), sons-in-law, and grandchildren of Julianne “Jules” Talmadge Beasley Lipscomb, family matriarch. Jules has been married to Harvey Lipscomb for 10 years, and he has taken her family as his own. But Harvey, a professor of gender and sexuality, has entered the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and he has been carrying a secret about his past that he knows he must share with Julianne before he can no longer remember it. His is not the only, nor the worst, secret that will rock the family. Perlman’s roots as an author of short stories are reflected in the structure of his novel. Divided into six chapters, the story of Jules and her family is told from different perspectives. In the third chapter, Perlman switches the voice from narrator to first person, temporarily handing the story over to Cliff, Sammy’s husband. Then, in the last third of the novel, as readers are settled in for the duration of the family reunion, Perlman jumps 15 or 16 years ahead to examine the consequences of secrets not yet revealed in the earlier sections. It’s a literary gamble, wrenching readers out of the warm, albeit fractious, comfort of the Lipscomb home and dumping them squarely in the debris left behind by an unanticipated treachery. Still, Perlman’s character portrayals are so visceral and poignant, we are willing to be dislocated in order to catch up with the events of the intervening years and see what has become of everyone. By the end of the narrative, readers have information that has not yet been shared with the surviving characters, information that will further tear asunder what remains of the family structure. Does Perlman intend a future novel to catch us up once again? One can only hope.
Heartbreaking, occasionally humorous, and powerful, with an ending not really satisfying but certainly lingering.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: MidTown Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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