In Goettel’s (Drakulya, 2009, etc.) novel set in a New England institution for the mentally challenged, a female client who has a history of running off those trying to help her gets a new male caseworker thanks to an open-minded director.
Goettel’s novel features a wonderfully uncommon setting: the Mancliffe Training School in Connecticut. One of the more unsettling clients at the school is 23-year-old Marya Bennett, “a kittenish pre-teen trapped in a twenty-something body.” Director Susan McManus takes a chance on an underemployed young man, John Kane, and hires him as Marya’s new one-on-one. Their story unfolds slowly—often too slowly—but the mysterious revelations prove worth the wait. Marya may be mentally challenged—retarded, according to the text—but she knows enough to use her striking looks and sexuality to get her way. John is either a gigolo or gay, depending on which of his co-workers you ask, while Susan heads the faith-based organization that contracts with the state to provide services to the institution’s clients. She also pastors the gay-friendly Goshen Meadows Congregational Church, which welcomes all comers yet teaches that homosexuality is sinful. (Susan is cagey about her own sexuality, so it’s unclear whether she might be drawn to Marya, John or both.) All three characters are carefully revealed in nuanced portrayals. There’s no nuance, however, to Goettel’s self-conscious, overwrought writing style, which unfortunately detracts from his story. The narrative flow is often interrupted by sentence fragments and bizarre punctuation: “John could not see Marya’s face; Susan was a study. Elegant insouciance; legs crossed, hands in her lap. What eloquence of female-bonding, John saw in a mirror darkly: dimmed promises of love and friendship, power in reserve.” The prose is much more effective in its short, clear passages. If the writing could just get out of the way, this could be a decent novel.
A provocative story held hostage by lofty prose and shoddy mechanics.
Pub Date: May 23, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 408
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2014
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
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