An absorbing novel of destructive love, false friends, and the cruelty of fate.
An adjunct professor falls prey to addiction.
The prolific Havel (Charlie Zero’s Last-Ditch Attempt, 2016, etc.) changes key in his latest novel, a chamber piece about friendship and drugs. Archie, the narrator, is a study in low self-esteem. He second-guesses himself, the people around him, and those friends who share his skin color (Archie is black) and who want to aspire to something other than second-class status. “I was making all types of mistakes at the bank,” Archie tells readers just after they meet him, “so I just resigned, because I knew I was incompetent.” Most mornings, on the way to his new job as a postal clerk, he drives his best friend, Reginald Meeks, to Reginald’s own job as an adjunct professor at a local school. Reginald is a dreamer and an intellectual but he’s also “forever a part of the temporary workers’ economy,” the fate of so many adjuncts in America. Things seem to be looking up for Reginald when he falls for Wonder Robins, a white student with an open mind. Archie is suspicious of his friend’s race-mixing, making for an uncomfortable conversation and a difficult read. But Archie changes his opinion entirely once he sees Reginald falling for Bianca instead, a party girl from the neighborhood who drugs Reginald (first with Ecstasy, then with cocaine) and violently seduces him. As Reginald falls into a downhill spiral, Archie—ostensibly a mere narrator—emerges as the tale’s most complex character, in some ways more engaging than Reginald. Archie laments “unschooled blacks with amazing potential wasted on the refuse of popular music and culture” while at the same time rolling his eyes at his friend’s aspirations: “By the time it takes to give a solid course in Black History, we’ll all be brainwashed and won’t know what our history is anyway.” The plot moves swiftly and the pages turn, but what keeps the reader most engaged is Archie in his endless contradictions: is he a supportive friend or a selfish saboteur? Despite a tendency to fall back on the same plot devices (various characters secretly drug one another a bit too often here), this story remains intriguing for the most part.
An absorbing novel of destructive love, false friends, and the cruelty of fate.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
