Unencumbered by gratuitous sex or violence, this engrossing Southern yarn delivers embittered characters, long-held...
An estranged mother and daughter reunite amid a maze of secrets and lies.
Alabama novelist Kaiser’s debut begins with Pearl, a troubled, reclusive mother of four grown kids who becomes distressed to discover that her youngest daughter, Abigail Whitney Stewart— a “love child” and the family’s “bad penny”—has returned to the county for unknown reasons. An aging widow obsessed with amassing real estate and maintaining her privacy, Pearl keeps abreast of the town’s gossip through her oldest and best friend, Doesie Mayfield, who informs her that Abby has come back. Abby, meanwhile, has spent her life moving from place to place with her husband, buying and selling houses. The most recent one is near her childhood home in Mobile Bay, Alabama, and the perfect place to unearth the secrets from her and her mother’s sordid past. That history, a melodramatic, serpentine affair, constitutes the book’s midsection in a hefty block of flashbacked chapters from 1954 as Pearl escapes an abusive marriage to raise her four children as a single mother, then relocates the family while she befriends and leases property from a cabal of wealthy local politicians. As the impressively written story chugs along, Kaiser builds narrative layers upon the tale’s foundation, expanding the characterizations of the children, Pearl, and the people she meets as she constructs and opens a lavish inn on her new property. As the establishment explodes in popularity, Abby’s plucky personality and blooming education keep Pearl on her toes, but soon, a series of childhood rapes forms a searing secret that begins to destroy Abby from within. Events escalate quickly: Pearl believes she is being bilked out of her business and exiled from the county while Abby emotionally divorces her mother, her brother and sisters, and the town itself after a contentious court case. Though thoroughly enjoyable, this tale suffers from the uneven appropriation of past and present narratives (and a few loose ends, including that the contentiousness between Pearl and Abby is never explored well enough to make the reader really believe they are enemies). Furthermore, the full circle of Abby’s emotional journey concludes somewhat hastily.
Unencumbered by gratuitous sex or violence, this engrossing Southern yarn delivers embittered characters, long-held histrionics, simmering resentments, and a plot that packs a deceptively potent punch.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2017
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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