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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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