A promising but flawed drama about a timely subject.
In Bennett’s debut novel, a young attorney in a prestigious Boston law firm discovers that she has more in common with a murder defendant that she imagined.
Elizabeth Curran has been working in civil litigation at Dwight and Summer for two years. Now she’s being given her first criminal case: the defense of Ruby Anderson, a 25-year-old mother of three who confessed to murdering her husband, Joey. It should be an open-and-shut case: Ruby was waiting for the police after the shooting and calmly told them that she shot Joey when he came home from work. Elizabeth drives to the Framingham women’s prison, expecting to find “an angry and defiant, overgrown and unruly fiend.” Instead, she discovers a “soft-spoken, gentle, temperate woman” who may actually be innocent. She begins to understand her boss’s order to accept no deals and find a way to obtain a verdict of “not guilty”; the defense strategy revolves around “battered woman’s syndrome.” Alternating with the story of the trial is the tale of Elizabeth’s relationship with her live-in boyfriend, Bruce. Bennett makes him a most unpleasant character from the minute he’s introduced: when Elizabeth returns home from work and announces, “I got assigned a tough pro bono case today,” Bruce responds, “You’re late and I’m starving.” His verbal and emotional abuse turns out to be frighteningly similar to the late Joey’s. The title of Bennett’s novel is taken from Abigail Adams’ entreaty to her husband, Founding Father John Adams, in 1776: “I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” Overall, Bennett is often an articulate advocate for abused women in this novel. However, her fondness for the rhythm of lengthy sentences needs taming: “The downpour continued to drench them as Erik frantically searched for the car keys in his pockets, in the empty cup holders, in the jam-packed glove box that held everything useful in the event of an automotive emergency except, of course, gloves and the keys to the car.” There are times when readers may reach the end of a long run-on sentence only to find that they’ve forgotten where it began. Also, many of the court battles seem simplistic, lacking the credibility of other tough legal dramas.
A promising but flawed drama about a timely subject.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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