Part comedy, part earnest investigation of current issues, this book offers a multifaceted mix of both.
From Beaudoin (Sex Wars 2084 Book Four, 2014, etc.) comes a novel about one man’s experience creating a religion in a backwoods Florida county.
“I am an architect, and I didn’t intend to start a new religion or create a video Bible,” the narrator, Joel Weatherton, tells the reader at the outset of this peculiar tale. This is, however, exactly what happens. After being commissioned to design a Christian church and community in Waccasassa County, Florida, Joel finds himself on the receiving end of threatening phone calls. Having an unbeliever like Joel design something as important as a church is tantamount to sacrilege, or so declare those who seek to intimidate him. As one caller states, “No atheist like you better not take no church design.” Unwilling to reject the commission (“The economy was down” Joel explains), he must risk the safety of himself and his family. Having grown up in Waccasassa County, Joel is more than familiar with the many gun-shooting, God-fearing denizens there. Confiding in his friend Helen and his bouncy 8-year-old daughter, Millie, he confesses that his transition from book-loving architect to prominent religious figure (whose followers wear Hawaiian shirts) is as strange as it sounds. Based largely on imagined miracles and Joel’s quest to help the common man, the story presents the lingering question of how long he can trick the world for the benefit of his fellow citizens. After gaining followers, he tells the reader, “I began to take my role as prophet somewhat more seriously when I saw how much I could help people.” Employing what is inherently a zany premise, the novel nevertheless tackles serious subjects, including the limitations of liberal thinking (“Did I want to join the politically correct crowd who use language to censor any ideas they don’t agree with?” Joel asks himself) and the destruction of Florida’s natural resources. Periods of extended dialogue tend to bog down the narrative, as whenever Joel walks Millie and others through the finer points of the books he likes (“That theme of how much we should trust our friends is important,” he says of Treasure Island). But perhaps even a modern prophet cannot deliver marvels and pizazz all the time.
Part comedy, part earnest investigation of current issues, this book offers a multifaceted mix of both.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 637
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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