A moody fairy tale of hope.
Stronger-willed than the father who abused her, a Midwestern girl sets out to find a better life.
The dynamics of Ruby’s father-dominated family life revolve around not getting caught alone with Dad in the basement. Ruby’s older sister Opal gets the brunt of their father’s sexual fury; their mother, a woman given to flights of fancy, never asks questions that might relieve her daughters’ plight. Ruby’s salvation comes from within: She has a vivid dream life; a sixth sense; and abundant love for nature, the animals she finds in the woods around her family’s home and the spirits she senses but cannot see. For much of her life, she has known she must leave home, and when the opportunity arises—she is offered a job as nanny to two beloved children of a wealthy L.A. couple—she takes it. But there she learns that it’s only the first step of her journey. Next, she needs to find her soulmate, and does so among the DVDs in the family film library. His name is Orion, a young British actor who has taken an unexplained leave of absence from Hollywood. Ruby travels to his hometown in England, ingratiates herself with his parents—the mother is a crone who sells potions and herbs; the father is a professor who researches the power of the feminine—and eventually is asked to help the parents, who have been secretly caring for Orion, injured months before in a fall from a horse. Ruby, whose dream world often bleeds into her reality, is at once frightened of her visions and willed by them. Many themes recurrent in Block’s work (Necklace of Kisses, 2005, etc., and the YA Weetzie Bat series) merge in this novel—magic, domestic violence, self-determination, the fortitude of women—and although the premise is slight and familiar, the storytelling casts a spell that transforms the narrative into something more.
A moody fairy tale of hope.Pub Date: July 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-084057-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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
A new edition of the by now classic collection of affiliated stories which has already established its deserved longevity.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1963
ISBN: 055338256X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1963
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