A suspenseful and entertaining disaster novel.
James tells the story of a nuclear power plant employee racing to save New York City from destruction in this thriller.
Trace Crane, a control-room supervisor at the Bear Mountain Nuclear Energy Center in the Hudson Valley, is about to meet his wife and daughter for a much-needed long weekend at a friend’s beach house in Greenwich, Connecticut, when the entire center begins to move: “the shaking hit like a mortar detonation, like Godzilla had grabbed the building and was trying to rattle all its contents out.” It’s an earthquake that causes a stationwide blackout; coolant isn’t getting to the reactors, which means that a full nuclear meltdown is imminent. Trace’s thoughts go immediately to his wife, Avi, and young daughter, Brooklyn, who get separated in the chaos when the 6.4 earthquake hits their town of Peekskill, New York. It falls to Trace to stabilize the reactors and find his family—if he can calm his nerves and focus. As the situation deteriorates, however, doing the right things becomes increasingly difficult: He may be able to save New York from annihilation—but if he does so, he may never see his family again. James writes in a taut, propulsive prose style that wrings a surprising amount of tension and dynamism out of the situation, particularly considering the book’s nearly 400-page length. Trace is a delightfully flawed hero—both inside and out, according to the author’s unflattering descriptions: “Stress, anger, and annoyance hung heavy in his jowls, ebullience springing free in unexpected smatterings of rising cheeks. Trace scratched at a patch of chronic psoriasis on his nose—a crust of pinkish-white flaky skin falling onto his paperwork.” James also isn’t afraid to get into the minutiae of just how a nuclear reactor works—and how one would fail—creating a foundation of verisimilitude on which the disaster-movie–style plot turns rest. James doesn’t reinvent the genre, but he does succeed in creating a claustrophobic and anxiety-producing thriller that will keep readers counting down to the final second.
A suspenseful and entertaining disaster novel.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 393
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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