Splendid romance from an author to watch.
Haunted by possibilities, depressed by realities, an English professor finds herself surprised by love in Densmore’s engrossing debut romance.
Life is losing its luster for 39-year-old Elizabeth “Ellie” Purnell, a teacher at a Wisconsin college. Draped in expensive clothes, wearing $500 shoes, and driving a Jaguar, Ellie seemingly has it all: “Being impeccably dressed gave her a sense of control. It was part of the persona. You know, the woman whose life is perfect. Professor Purnell, the town prodigy…ageless, brilliant, witty, reserved, and without flaw.” It’s a charade. Her hunky but alcoholic husband, Alec, ignores her work; he isn’t interested in her scholarly articles and has no clue she’s a poet. Her sweet, beloved 14-year-old son, Jordan, has diabetes. And Ellie fears she will never match her father James Lawson’s academic success. Despite her “unbearable urge to escape,” she stays, bolstered by duty, family (especially her younger sister, Becca), dance excursions to Chicago with feisty American lit prof (and lesbian) Marta, and a daily 5 a.m. run during which she calms herself by saying, “Be a funnel, not a vessel.” Then chaos arrives in the form of visiting professor Liam Curran, a famous Irish/English literary critic. The charismatic scholar and academic star insists on a series of debates with Ellie about literature, starting with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s a dream come true and a terrifying challenge for Ellie, who is thrown by Liam’s intensity and intimate knowledge of all her work: he’s read seemingly everything she’s ever written, even an undergraduate paper. Densmore’s beautifully crafted romance vibrates with sexual tension and passion familiar to fans of Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters. Among readers, poets and scholars might relate to the indulgent dream of having one’s words reach and affect a true soul mate. While the flashback chapters to Ellie’s student days—when she passionately lived with self-absorbed musician Dylan Ross, a Percy Bysshe Shelley–type—break the narrative flow, they are worth it for a terrific scene in which she violently cuts off his long hair. The surprising, bittersweet conclusion satisfies the hope that true love never dies.
Splendid romance from an author to watch.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
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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