Historically inaccurate with prose that doesn’t sparkle.
A novel of slavery, drugs, conspiracy and revenge.
A planter in colonial Georgia decided to import slaves from Africa to work his plantation, and at the urging of one of those slaves, the planter then enslaved members of the Bawss tribe, whose descendants serve as the novel’s focus. In the 1950s, Jakob Bawss graduates from college, determined to make a name for himself despite the prejudice he faces as an African-American. When he loses his job in the auto industry, Stephanie, a former co-worker, shares a formula she has developed for a highly addictive drug. Jakob refines the formula, renames the drug “crack” and quickly dominates the Detroit drug trade. Through the next two decades, Jakob expands his crack empire and reconnects with Stephanie, who admits that she also shared the crack formula with Ronald Reagan, another former co-worker. Jakob learns that the spread of crack was a plot by Stephanie and Reagan to subdue the African-American population. Throughout the tale, the author makes a number of factual errors, both minor (Jakob moves into a “three-room condo” in 1959 Detroit, though the first residential condominium in the United States was built in Utah in 1960) and major: The book opens in 1620 Georgia, but England did not establish its colony there until the 1700s. Reagan is shown losing the 1976 presidential election, but Gerald Ford, not Reagan, was the national candidate. The writing itself is little better, with anachronistic dialogue (“I’m sorry you guys, but I just remember too vividly the extreme lengths we had to go through to get here from Africa. I’m not sure that we’re prepared or capable of getting a ship, let along driving [sic] one,” one slave says to another in the 1660s) and awkward prose (“He had an extremely athletic body, one that made him seem as if he were an athlete, although he was far from it”). In addition, scenes of rape and torture are described in gratuitous detail.
Historically inaccurate with prose that doesn’t sparkle.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 159
Publisher: SBR Publications
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2013
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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