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Azaleas Don't Bloom Here

Name: Azaleas Don't Bloom Here
Author: Frank Klus

A DYSTOPIAN NOVEL

by Frank Klus ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2016

Michael Moore meets Nineteen Eighty-Four in this pulpy action-thriller, which explores the pathologies of rampant capitalist...

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In Klus’ (Take the Pilgrim Road, 2013) sci-fi sequel, a businessman finds himself embroiled in a revolutionary conspiracy in a nightmarish future America, where powerful corporate interests and gangsterlike cops dominate the government.

In the downsized North America of 2065, after a period of virtual civil war, the federal authority is going broke and a corporate-dominated, fascist/capitalist lobby called NOGOV has reduced society to feudal terms. Chicago is a vast, semi-anarchic urban ruin, filled with homeless people and junkies (legal drugs and prostitution are proven moneymakers), while ultra-rich citizens dwell in a gated community called the Fortress. A patchwork of police-militias, composed of laid-off military men and mercenaries with varying degrees of loyalty, sadism, and psychosis, maintain a semblance of law and order in “Old America.” Eugene Sulke, a member of the remaining upper middle class, is an accountant from an influential family who’s apolitical, although he maintains a friendship with a Howard Zinn–like professor. Sulke is suddenly caught between the “Lightning Squad,” an elite police force rapidly degrading into a bunch of warlord-gangsters, and a violent, resourceful group of disillusioned ex-police officers and commandos seeking to radicalize him. After a brush with secret, government-sanctioned torture, he takes a fugitive route to “New America,” a supposed West Coast haven, run on the co-op model, that’s enduring a media blackout and trade embargo. The novel’s sometimes-creaky plot mechanics require more than a little suspension of disbelief: formerly toadying journalists suddenly deliver scoops damaging to the oligarchs; brainwashed neoconservatives recover their memories and transform into freedom fighters; and secret letters and top-secret messages conveniently surface. The pallid Sulke seems an unlikely protagonist for readers to make a fuss over, and one might argue that a satire, rather than a serious action-thriller, would have been a better vehicle for putting across a depraved American society where free-market Mafia and gun-nut AM radio talkers have their way. That said, the narrative should still engage readers who think that Occupy Wall Street has a point, as it offers a vicarious visit to a RoboCop-like plutocracy collapsing from its own socioeconomic rottenness.

Michael Moore meets Nineteen Eighty-Four in this pulpy action-thriller, which explores the pathologies of rampant capitalist greed and corruption.

Pub Date: June 6, 2016

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 363

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: May 10, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.