A manifesto about the need to change, which may leave readers wishing it were as reflective as it is revealing.
Olsen dishes up lukewarm shock-and-awe stories in a memoir of self-discovery.
These loosely connected stories, told by a disillusioned software engineer whose outlook is informed by his outrageous past, begin with a resolution: Olsen is going to turn his life around. His career is stagnant; Anna, the object of his affection, consistently rebuffs his advances; and he’s choked by the fallout of numerous poor life choices. He chronicles an itinerant lifestyle, from San Diego to Milwaukee and back again, while digressing into sometimes lewd, sometimes unbelievable tales of youth steeped in enough liquor and hard drugs to give a contact-high. A grab bag of random episodes includes his being blackout drunk, a dysfunctional relationship with an unfaithful heroin addict, a fistfight with his mother’s abusive boyfriend and unfortunate liaisons with chat room strangers. Any of these could be jumping-off points for the changes Olsen claims to want to make, but instead of hinting at contemplativeness or regret, they come across mostly as boasts. At times, the details suffer from a lack of imagination; early on, a description of Anna reads, “Her long straight brown hair hanged around an adoring gorgeous smile; blissfully covering those blue piercing eyes of hers that could heat an entire ocean.” The parts that might be intriguing on their own—such as Olsen’s misadventures as a 21-year-old in Tijuana or a trip aboard the supposedly haunted Queen Mary—are offset by a passive voice (“An awkward laugh with a very short lifespan from him was then made”) and straining syntax. Though most stories are crass enough to be off-putting, there are moments of tenderness woven in. Olsen’s recollection of his grandfather’s death, and the impact it had on him, is refreshingly vulnerable, a welcome beacon of humanity by the late hour of its arrival.
A manifesto about the need to change, which may leave readers wishing it were as reflective as it is revealing.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2014
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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