The result is a gripping portrait of life stripped to the bare essentials.
A woman follows her heart to the frigid wilds of Alaska in this rugged romance.
She loves the warmth of San Diego, but 29-year-old Carrie Ritter is tired of her humdrum job as a dental hygienist and the parade of losers that mars her love life. (She had to beat up the latest Romeo when he tried to rape her.) A solution to both problems surfaces in the person of Bart McFee, a tall, gray-eyed, 30-something fugitive from society,” manly yet gentle, who wants to whisk Carrie off to his spread in Alaska. A few plane rides and a dog-sled trek later, she is appalled to arrive at a tiny, wood-heated cabin, with an outhouse set a daunting distance away amid a waist-high October snowfall. Carrie wants to leave, but Bart has already shot all but one of the sled dogs–too many mouths to feed–and there’s no getting out until the river ice breaks up in the spring. Carrie frets and sulks, but Bart soothes her with readings from Thoreau and Whitman, the majestic scenery dazzles her, and the rigors of frontier life give her a bracing sense of self-sufficiency; soon the cabin walls resonate with her and Bart’s sexual raptures. Then, in the months-long winter darkness, Bart leaves for a day’s hunting and doesn’t return–and Carrie’s struggle to survive begins in earnest. Her story intertwines, a bit awkwardly, with the Jack London-ish saga of a wolf named Daredevil, who mercilessly hunts down fawns and then regurgitates them to his hungry pups. Groome is a fluent writer with a gift for evoking setting and character. The novel does have its tedious moments when Carrie and Bart, who is a bland, underdeveloped romantic hero, sit around talking about their relationship, and its climax misfires. But when Groome tests his characters, human and animal, against the wilderness, he moves us with the harshness and beauty of an uncivilized world.
The result is a gripping portrait of life stripped to the bare essentials.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: B0076Q30J4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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