A heart-rending tale both brutal and beautiful.
A war veteran returns home wracked with guilt.
Jacob Miranda was a sergeant in the Army and served two tours in Iraq before an improvised explosive device killed five of his men. Upon his return to Tucson, he struggles with civilian life. Tormented by nightmares, panic attacks, and migraines, he’s also lost in a dead-end job as a security guard. Unlike his mother, Jacob finds no solace in religion. His guilt becomes a psychic weight that grows even heavier when another soldier once under his command overdoses on drugs after he’s discharged. Jacob’s grief is movingly expressed by debut author Mabante: “But most of all, I wished that I could forget the faces—the ones that haunted my dreams nearly every night as they screamed out in soundless torment. They were a constant reminder that I’d let them all down—a silent indictment of my failure to protect my men.” Jacob drinks to assuage his troubles and contemplates re-enlisting or, in even darker moments, taking his own life. His family, especially his older sister, Monica, tries to rescue him from his despair, but he’s all but hopeless until his best friend from childhood, the girl he’s always been in love with, Maddie, lends her undying support. This is a familiar tale—so familiar it now constitutes a literary genre—but Mabante also adds a kind of novel within a novel: the story of Jacob and Maddie’s friendship beginning in childhood. Also, Jacob wrestles with the disclosure of a dark family secret, kept from him the whole of his life, a key to his character vividly drawn by Mabante. The writing tends toward stylistic realism, but it’s also by turns poetically charged, even poignant. Furthermore, Mabante’s depiction of the psychological challenges (the sting and ache of trauma, the jarring reabsorption into quotidian life) that combat veterans face unfolds in raw, honest terms.
A heart-rending tale both brutal and beautiful.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68433-135-2
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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