A surprisingly engaging soap-opera romance with a slum setting.
A New York philanthropist and Caribbean ex-stripper with a dying daughter discover new love and purpose together in this debut novel, the first installment of a trilogy.
While his sassy girlfriend (and work colleague) Donna Cruz derides him for being pompous, there is no denying that Robert Beaufort, 50, has suffered grievous loss, with his wife and twin daughters tragically killed in a train accident. The newspaper printing executive has since turned his life to philanthropy, forming the Kids of the World charity. He travels to San Cristobal, a small Caribbean island, hoping to get its president’s guarantee that a Kids of the World donation will be used to help those in need in its oppressed slum region. During his stay on the island, Robert witnesses the horrific injury of a man resulting from the slum’s ridiculous and hazardous infrastructure conditions (there is an uncompleted pedestrian bridge). Robert also gets hurt and ends up entering the slum for treatment, where he meets Julianna Miranda, 27, who has just left her job as a stripper to run her own store in the slum. She’s also the unhappy wife of Pedro Miranda, the man Robert saw injured, and the mother of Alba, dealing with a deadly heart condition. Robert is increasingly drawn to Julianna and determined to help Alba. Through various machinations, he secures funding for Alba’s care. By the novel’s end, Robert and Julianna admit and express their love, but various factors, including island politics and Pedro’s further incapacitation, pose new challenges for this unlikely pair. Carroll, who has newspaper and Caribbean humanitarian experience, has crafted a tale that has somewhat annoying male-fantasy elements (ah, the middle-aged man gets the former stripper!), but ultimately elicits sympathy and rooting for his lead characters as well as colorful secondary cohorts. The author also defies expectations in several key places in this narrative (Donna and Julianna, for example, never engage in battling-for-Robert catfights), making this novel an admirably nuanced read. Carroll also ends this work by offering a teaser of upcoming twists, including island-wide upheaval and a new pregnancy, thus whetting interest in the main couple’s further adventures.
A surprisingly engaging soap-opera romance with a slum setting.Pub Date: March 14, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Vanity Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 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
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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