A fast-paced and ebullient contemporary romance.
A young college grad deals with new experiences in love and labor in Roberts’ novel.
As this book opens, Denise feels like she’s at rock bottom. Two weeks earlier, she’d graduated college with a degree in English, a few awards for her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writing, and a mountain of student loan debt waiting to crash down on her. After a depressing round of job interviews, she’s had no luck finding work, and to make matters worse, her comfortable (and free) living arrangement with her parents is about to end, as they’re taking early admission to a retirement community. Denise shares her frustrations with her close friends Emma, Claire, and Stephanie (“we were less Sex in the City and more Restless in a Podunk Town,” Denise narrates). On a lark, she answers an ad for a job as a dogsitter. She soon meets the greyhounds’ wealthy owners, Mitchell and Ruth (“she looked like a politician's wife, always ready to greet someone important”), and the dogs themselves—pampered greyhounds named Pepper and Dante. The interview goes well, and suddenly things are looking up: She has a new job (albeit with eccentric bosses), a new sense of purpose, and even a tentative new love interest: a handsome, funny man named Logan, whom she and her friends meet during a night out. Over the course of this novel, Roberts grounds her story in a light, breezy tone, giving Denise quite a few jokes in which she comments on her own haplessness: “I was about to dig deeper into that statement, when I saw a small glob of sauce at the bottom of my hair,” goes one such passage while dining with Logan. “Seriously?” Roberts manages to maintain this snappy, effervescent tone throughout the narrative, even when it turns into something more complex and, at times, darker than an average rom-com-with-dogs tale. The attention that Roberts gives to secondary characters is especially gratifying, and it gives the entire novel a pleasingly well-populated feel.
A fast-paced and ebullient contemporary romance.Pub Date: April 24, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 361
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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