A captivating, character-driven road trip with a group of memorable bikers.
Four West Coast biker buddies hit the pavement for a life-altering journey across California.
Urban’s (A Line Intersected, 2017) contemporary novel chronicles the escapades of a hardscrabble group of motorcyclists: the narrator, Jordan Wryte; his younger brother, Steven; and friends Michael Case and Derek Connor. As Jordan pauses to reflect that the men “did the best we could to understand what the world was telling us,” he backtracks to explain how the fours pals got to where they are now. All four rendezvous at the narrator’s home business in San Diego, where a plan is hatched to take a group motorcycle trip touring California. At the age of 27, Jordan finds himself worrisome and overprotective of Steven, six years younger, as he carries out their mother’s dying wish to watch over him. The group is a tough, no-nonsense, and hard-drinking bunch prone to spats and discord, so Jordan is initially reluctant about the trip but eventually concedes and joins the others. He insists that they leave their cellphones behind, so perceptive readers will see what’s coming as the exhaustive journey not only shows each man the sights and sounds of unfamiliar territory, but opens old familial wounds and slashes wide a few new ones as well. While attentive to the minute details of his characters’ machinations, the San Diego author is also quite masterful at vividly depicting a biker’s life, the trip’s dusty locations, and the exhilaration and freedom felt as the open road beckons. As they endure a sandstorm and pass the fetid Salton Sea, Derek keeps disappearing with Steven and episodes of festering infighting threatens the friendships. Meanwhile, a sinister motorcycle group they pass and troublemakers near Michael’s aunt’s house cast dark shadows across the trip. Thankfully, the men continue bonding even in the face of a tragic, complicated accident near the novel’s end. Urban writes methodically and in a conversational tone, slowly moving his story forward with minute particulars that seem initially mundane but eventually are endearing and enrich the story. Readers who appreciate novels that linger over each character’s move will find this book enjoyable. Once the tale begins to heat up on the road and the personality of each biker turns distinctive and edgy, the story becomes more charismatic, engrossing, and slyly addictive. Readers will want to hear more from these characters.
A captivating, character-driven road trip with a group of memorable bikers.Pub Date: May 15, 2023
ISBN: 9798986407005
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Left Coast Lit
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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
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
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