A wild, comic tale about a zany startup and its discontents that struggles with clarity.
A startup prepares to launch revolutionary tooth implants as chaos reigns at the company and an FDA trial looms in Goldstein’s novel.
Chauncey Orbaugh III is called Trace, a nickname that stuck “due to a misspelling of the Spanish number three he had made on a junior high test that he never lived down.” His investment firm funds TeeGentics, a raucous startup that claims it will revolutionize the dental market with low-cost genetically engineered tooth implants. The company promises that their test tube-grown teeth will be perfect and white and help countless millions around the world—for a fee of $99.99 per tooth. TeeGentics’s product is the brainchild of Dr. Werner Brandt and is partially funded by a foundation overseen by Liz Cleaver, heir to a cannabis company. All is not well at TeeGentics: The teeth have immense potential, but they’re untested, and an FDA trial is upcoming. New head of research Bob Oppenheimer is tackling the problem of tooth death, since the implants are actually dying after a week. He recommends a DNA fertilizer to supercharge the teeth, but when lab assistant Billy becomes a test subject, the side effects are troubling—his libido explodes and he gets a permanent erection, followed by impotence. When FDA agents arrive at TeeGentics and start asking questions, Trace can barely keep his sanity—let alone the company—intact, with everything seemingly on the verge of collapse. Goldstein’s riotous novel about a wacky biotech startup runs the gamut from plausible to outlandish, with all the action happening at a frenetic pace. It’s a fun idea, and the characters feel authentic in their stressed-out roles. In the midst of the chaos, though, some scenes don’t go anywhere, and the hazy language used in descriptions can make the story hard to follow. The third act is easier to swallow and becomes enjoyable to read, but the path there has some obstacles as well.
A wild, comic tale about a zany startup and its discontents that struggles with clarity.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9798458128315
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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