Reading this novel is like entering a second childhood. You have our permission.
Back to the Whistle Stop Cafe, in a story ranging from the 1930s to the present day.
The setting of Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987), beloved both in print and on film, returns in a sweet ol’ novel which could not possibly be less of the moment. That sound you hear? A gazillion fans rejoicing. The update includes several of the original characters—largely a bunch of good-hearted white people and a couple of meanies—from a small town outside Birmingham, Alabama. By the 1990s, it turns out, the whole town is in ruins and its denizens in diaspora throughout the South, mostly kept in touch by Dot Weems, who eventually replaced her long-running newsletter, The Weems Weekly, with Christmas letters and occasional bulletins. The titular wonder boy is the one-armed prince Bud Threadgoode, son of the late Ruth Jamison, who owned the cafe in the 1930s with her partner, Idgie Threadgoode (sadly, no new lesbian romances this time around). In 2013, Bud is retired from his veterinary practice and living at Briarwood Manor in Atlanta, where he moved when his ailing wife, Peggy, became too hard to care for without help. Though healthy himself, he decided to stay on after her death even though his daughter, Ruthie, widowed young, has begged him to move in with her. Unfortunately, she lives next door to her awful mother-in-law, Martha Lee Caldwell, and Bud ain’t goin’ there. Martha Lee is a horrible rich old Southern lady; one of the funniest moments in the book occurs when she gets her 23andMe results. Homesick for the good old days, Bud sneaks out of Briarwood to take one last glance at his hometown, and here the ambling narrative finally gets moving. Though you don’t have to read the first book to understand the new one, it wouldn’t hurt, either, since there’s a lot of backstory filled in in clumps and you’ll catch on sooner if you know who’s who. Or watch the movie; Flagg was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay.
Reading this novel is like entering a second childhood. You have our permission.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13384-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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