A political satire about an unconventional candidate that both thrills and edifies.
An anonymous blogger suddenly becomes a serious contender for the American presidency in this satire.
Gary King, an unemployed, pot-smoking journalist, writes a short article extolling the virtues of Common 2 Cents, or C2C, an incognito political blogger, for president. The article was meant as a lark, but it hits a popular nerve and goes viral, transforming C2C into a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in advance of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. Gary becomes a reluctant celebrity in his own right and decides he has no choice but to discover C2C’s true identity. To that end, he enlists the help of his friend Ginny Evans, a brilliant computer scientist. Meanwhile, the tumult roils Gary’s life, straining his already uncertain relationship with his girlfriend, Amanda. In Magee’s third work of fiction (Darkness All Around, 2011, etc.), he taps into the political turmoil of the day, describing upheavals that closely mirror the current scene. There’s a lackluster Democratic candidate with a virtual lock on the nomination and a divisive Republican one who promiscuously traffics in incendiary, racially charged rhetoric. Ginny deftly captures the disorder of the moment: “The Republican rank and file is just as sick of the status quo as the Democratic rank and file. It’s really a bottom up revolution, especially since there isn’t some hierarchical structure to the whole thing. The cult of personality is so yesterday.” The rise of C2C is as populist as it gets: not only is the blogger’s entire campaign run through free press coverage and social media, but it’s not even officially declared. The most virulent reaction to C2C’s popularity comes from an entrenched establishment desperate to cling to power. Magee has an ear for political satire—besides the clever contemporary parallels, the writing is buoyant and genuinely funny. It’s hard to fully identify with C2C’s ascendancy, though, since so little is revealed about his political principles other than the fact that he’s neither a conventional Republican nor Democrat. The relentless pace of the plot, and the gimlet-eyed gamesomeness, though, should keep the reader well entertained.
A political satire about an unconventional candidate that both thrills and edifies.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Reel Lies Books
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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