An effective and amusing lottery tale.
A massive lottery jackpot prompts the denizens of a New Mexico city to contemplate riches and greed.
In Sever’s debut novel, when a lottery’s potential payout climbs as high as $1 billion, it seems as if all the residents of Albuquerque have random chances and massive payoffs on their minds. The Rev. Jon Holiday and his wife, Grace, for instance, have differing views on the subject. Jon attempts to take a distant, philosophical, even slightly disapproving attitude, reminding his wife that greed is the root of all evil, whereas Grace never misses an opportunity to tell her husband that their strip-mall storefront church is perennially low on funds and could immensely benefit from such an astronomical injection of cash. “Every Monday morning,” when the benevolent reverend is at his desk, his wife “counts out the meager Sunday collection in an irritating whisper before depositing the money at the bank.” Lin Tanaka of the Zeniscapes landscaping company tries to take a Zen-like stance on the chance of winning. Guy Springfield wishes his accountant neighbor Nick Sterling good luck in the lottery and is sternly told that winning has nothing to do with luck: “It’s about crunching numbers and reducing the odds to zero—pure mathematics.” The author moves his intriguing story forward with economical skill, believable philosophical inquiry, and a good deal of dry humor. When a pious member of the congregation mentions that Grace is well named, for instance, she muses: “Her dear mother was flying high on magic mushrooms at Woodstock and heard Grace Slick singing ‘White Rabbit’ with Jefferson Airplane when her perfectly named daughter was conceived.” Sever also skillfully explores the characters’ yearnings. Nick is so certain he’s cracked the math of the lottery that he’s already dreaming of his post-victory fame: “In anticipation of that, he’s prepared an eight-page treatise on the Grand Sterling Algorithm for Science. Of course, he simplified the mathematics for his TED Talk which he’s confident will happen.” The book deftly builds to a climax that’s both funny and genuinely touching.
An effective and amusing lottery tale.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Burning Leaf Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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