A touching book about friendship between man and gorilla.
In this debut novel, a man trying to rebuild his life goes to Africa, where he strikes up a unique rapport with a gorilla.
After the untimely death of his wife and only son, David Durfee is in a bad way. Desperate to halt his downward spiral, he accepts an offer to go with a church group to Uganda for a few months to do volunteer work at a mission. Once there, he has a chance encounter with a large silverback gorilla. However, instead of becoming violent, the meeting results in an unusual friendship. Durfee names the gorilla “George,” teaches him some rudimentary sign language, and plays him some music. George acts as a kind of therapist for Durfee, listening silently as the man pours his heart out regarding his lost family. Trouble looms, however, when a poacher with a grudge seeks to kill George. Meanwhile, the mortgage on the mission complex comes due, and the landlord already has a wealthy corporation lined up to become the new owner, with plans to build a hotel. Minier has written a simple yet direct book that will speak to anyone who yearns to get away from it all but who’s wary of uncertainty. The author’s theme—that you never know what can happen until you try—is central to the book and never buried under useless verbiage or rambling subplots. The storylines are all germane to the main story and resolved quickly. The prose is vivid, as in his description of Ugandan jungle flowers: “There were lobelia, with their broad, circular green flowers, purple flowered veronica, and St. John’s Wart bushes with brilliant yellow blossoms.” He also mixes in numerous Swahili words—the title, for example, is Swahili for “friend”—which reinforces the story’s realism. He makes skillful use of a large character roster, never taking the spotlight off Durfee but also making the others distinctive; of one secondary character, Mel, he writes, “He had replaced…the baseball cap…worn at orientation with a classic safari pith helmet.” The book’s premise is basic and has been done countless times before, as in White Fang (1906) and Lassie Come Home (1940). However, its message is still profound.
A touching book about friendship between man and gorilla.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lumino Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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