An engaging, if uneven, novel about personal upheaval during a time of monumental social change.
In Stevens’ (Sirens’ Songs, 2011, etc.) intelligent novel, the civil-rights March on Washington ignites one woman’s journey to heartbreak and self-awareness.
It’s August 27, 1963, and Cynthia, a white, divorced researcher for a New York history-book publisher, gets off the bus in Washington, D.C., eager to spend her two-week vacation with her boyfriend, Lester. But Cynthia is surrounded by people arriving for another reason: the March on Washington, scheduled for the following day, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and others would speak to hundreds of thousands. The city is restless; when Cynthia arrives at Lester’s house, the moment is disrupted by a neighbor calling in a false fire alarm. Lester, a white journalist originally from Texas, is focused on the March; all Cynthia wants to talk about is getting married. Soon after Cynthia arrives, Lester’s college roommate calls to announce that he’s in town and demands to see Lester. Throw in the general tumult of Lester’s African-American neighborhood on the eve of the March, and Cynthia’s fantasies of a romantic vacation don’t stand a chance. Before Lester leaves to work on a story, he and Cynthia schedule a late-night drink with Lester’s roommate. Over the next 24 hours, Cynthia participates in the March on Washington, witnesses life-changing events, and confronts her own painful memories. Stevens’ tightly structured tale is filled with compelling observations: For example, when Cynthia gets off the bus, the driver’s eyes slide down her body, “exploring the folds of [her] skirt like a sticky finger.” The novel confines the story to two days, which allows the characters to move quickly through the narrative, but it includes too many subplots for such a short time span. Although Cynthia tells her story in the first person, we learn more about Lester, and Cynthia’s first husband, Frank, than we do about Cynthia herself. This choice highlights Cynthia’s willingness to sacrifice everything for love, but readers may wish that the protagonist were more clearly drawn.
An engaging, if uneven, novel about personal upheaval during a time of monumental social change.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: BrickHouse Books, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 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
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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