An intriguing fantasy concept that sometimes gets sidetracked by a wordy narrative.
In this debut novel, a maid searches for her lover in a bizarre world.
Miller’s fantasy is about the residents, human and otherwise, of The Coast, a region that has a colonial feel to it. This tale starts as a love story between a seaman named Tom and Katie Jean, a maid at one of Port Jay’s many mansions. But when Tom ships out for a two-year voyage, things start to fall apart, both for the couple and The Coast itself. Catastrophes befall the land, some thanks to supernatural acts, some a result of human stupidity and greed. Port Jay is leveled by fire, creating a stream of refugees in a land whose resources are stretched thin. A pregnant Katie goes on the road in search of Tom, accompanied by her fellow servant Tavish, who harbors an unrequited love for her. Tom isn’t faring much better. He loses his earnings to card sharks, falls off his ship, and ends up swallowed by a leviathan. Freed from the monster, he gets tortured by pirates. Then there’s the king’s army waging campaigns against native tribes and runaway slaves, resulting in major casualties on all sides. Miller has also thrown such evil or capricious creatures as witches, gods, a werewolf, and even the devil himself into the mix. The author has built this tale around the proverb “An idle mind is the Devil’s workshop.” All the characters do well in their day-to-day activities, but get into trouble when they start to ponder life too much. There is far too much philosophizing, which makes for a draggy narrative. “God is language. And language is God. God puts meaning into the sounds that come out of our mouths. And that’s what creates and rules the universe,” asserts a character named Colophus of Demarest. In Tom and Katie, Miller delivers fully developed protagonists in whom readers can become invested. But he puts them through hell and they don’t get a story arc that satisfies. Most of his unethically fuzzy characters do deserve the gruesome fates they receive. While the author offers crackling dialogue, lengthy descriptive passages make the novel seem even longer than its 413 pages. Tighter editing could have given Miller’s story a more pleasing flow.
An intriguing fantasy concept that sometimes gets sidetracked by a wordy narrative.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 413
Publisher: Dreamy Moon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2019
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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