Stunning. A remarkable debut.
In precise and lyrical prose, newcomer Gross spins this gorgeously melancholic tale of two scientists from opposite ends of the globe whose paths eventually cross.
Still confused about her marine biologist brother's death by drowning—was it accident or suicide?—American Annabel Mendelssohn arrives in a remote region of Australia to observe fruit bats as part of a graduate program in field studies. Ambitious and eccentric, Annabel feels alienated from the other students, especially her roommate, Sabrina, a catty blond who fills their room with "toxic-waste face paint . . . curlers and thong underwear," and seems more interested in bagging Lars, the program's pretty boy, than studying. Despite her serious attitude toward work, Annabel, though, finds herself attracted to John Goode, the 50-ish professor overseeing her project. A reckless genius with mismatched eyes (one brown, one blue), Professor Goode has recently separated from his wife of many years in a postlude to his first affair. Their son, Leon, reacts with rage. Depressed and disillusioned with hard science—his father's terrain—Leon drops out of graduate school at Harvard, takes a job as an educator at the Boston Museum of Science, and obsesses over his shapely co-worker Ursula. When Professor Goode disappears without a trace, Leon flies home and sets off in search of his father. That journey leads him to Annabel, who has been living alone in the rainforest watching her bats. Still feeling an intimate connection to John Goode, she leaves her research to accompany Leon on his quest. The two annoy each other at first, then fall in love. Meanwhile, Gross has an amazing ability to convey the subtlest emotional shifts; her novel thrums with psychological intensity, and there's no shortage of acerbic wit. In Annabel, she's created a quirky character with the staying power of L.M. Montgomery's Anne Shirley.
Stunning. A remarkable debut.Pub Date: April 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6492-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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