A sharp, immersive family drama played out against the ravages of war.
Slaughter (Echoes of Distant Thunder, 2011) continues the saga of the Castor family against the backdrop of World War I and the mining industry.
Two generations removed from Will Castor, the haunted veteran of the Civil War’s Battle of Chickamauga, the Castors have become a prominent family in the mining town of Ishpeming, Michigan. When a conflict even greater than the War Between the States breaks out in Europe, two of the Castor boys answer the call: John, a shy, studious young man whom the other Marines call “Teach,” and Matt, a charming rake who’s popular with his fellow soldiers as well as with the farm girls of France. On the home+front, their brother Jacob commits a taboo by asking to marry their adopted sister, Rosemarie. Another brother, Bill, runs off to sail the Great Lakes but descends into a listless life of women and booze. In Ishpeming, their father, Robert, attempts to hold the family together while managing the town’s profitable, if dangerous, mine for a Cleveland-based mining company. As pressures mount at home and abroad, the family members are pressed to the limits of their strength, locked in a struggle against the complex, deadly industry of man. The author again demonstrates a remarkable knack for period details—from contemporary slang and popular dances to the equipment and routines of the mining industry—and a powerful ability to render battlefields in all their terrible, peculiar horror: “Sporadic enemy shells had begun to land close by….They were not the earth-shaking detonations of high explosives; they were the dull thuds of gas shells.” As in the previous novel in the Castor Family Trilogy, the real war here is internal and lasts long after shots have ceased to ring out; it’s fought in the minds of those lucky (or unlucky) enough to survive. With this story, however, Slaughter is able to expand beyond the effects of war on one person to explore their repercussions for an entire family—a clan that holds sacred its responsibility to protect its members from harm.
A sharp, immersive family drama played out against the ravages of war.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Mission Point Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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