A mesmerizing odyssey through the beauty, suffering, and rage that flow from the irrepressible desire to live.
Fleeing famine and the misfortune of her family, a young woman embarks on a perilous quest to survive in South Korean novelist Hwang’s (Familiar Things, 2018, etc.) latest.
The youngest in a family of seven daughters in 1980s North Korea, Bari’s arrival into the world brings great disappointment. Named after an old Korean myth—wherein an abandoned princess searches the globe for an elixir that will bring peace to the dead—Bari is abandoned at birth but later found and brought home by her family’s dog. To the delight of Bari's grandmother, the girl has inherited their ancestors’ gift of sight, an ability she surreptitiously helps Bari nurture. When famine sweeps North Korea in the 1990s, news arrives that Bari’s uncle has defected to the south, bringing with it harrowing realities that infect and dismantle their home. The family fractures, and Bari, her grandmother, sister Hyun, and dog, Chilsung (with whom Bari speaks telepathically), are smuggled across the border to China. Alas, no sooner do they find safety than Hyun, Grandmother, and Chilsung die within months of each other. Despondent and alone, 13-year-old Bari ends up in Yanji, working as an apprentice at a foot massage parlor. It’s there that she discovers her unique ability to map strangers’ lives through touching them. After an unpaid debt upends the business, Bari lands in the bottom of a cramped cargo ship on its way to England. In the ship’s darkness, she dissociates, slipping into “layers of the otherworld,” each sensation “like soft fabric tearing each time I shed my body.” This transient place that Hwang expertly builds conjures the disorientation brought by tragedy. In its unnerving darkness we wonder, as Bari falls further away from her body, if she might never make it back to the surface. In London, Bari’s consciousness elasticizes, making room for her permeable worlds to coexist. As her body takes root in a new place, Bari finds love and even happiness, and eventually finds work as a healer, helping others mine their sorrows. Still, with growth comes deep pain, and Hwang uses Bari’s isolation and quiet agony to depict the psychic trauma that settles into the lives of those who are displaced.
A mesmerizing odyssey through the beauty, suffering, and rage that flow from the irrepressible desire to live.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947534-54-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Readers will love the quirky characters in this clever yarn. Pendergast and Coldmoon make an excellent pair.
The 18th installment in the Pendergast series by Preston and Child (City of Endless Night, 2018, etc.) gives the hero a partner in the hunt for a strange killer.
A woman walks a dog in a Miami Beach cemetery, and her dog finds a human heart. Soon more hearts turn up at the gravesites of women thought to have committed suicide a decade before. The FBI assigns agents Pendergast and Coldmoon to work with the Miami PD on the case. Pendergast is highly successful in closing cases on his own but “was about as rogue as they came,” and suspects tend not to survive his investigations. Agent Coldmoon’s secret assignment is to keep a close eye on his partner, “a bomb waiting to go off,” who tends to do something “out of left field, or of questionable ethics, or even specifically against orders.” The current victims are women whose throats have been slit and breastbones split open to remove their hearts, all in quick and expert fashion. The killer leaves notes at the graves, signed “Mister Brokenhearts.” This kind of weirdness is in Pendergast’s wheelhouse, as he’s an odd sort himself, quite outside the FBI culture. Rather like Sherlock Holmes, he sees patterns that others miss. He’s tall, gaunt, dresses like an undertaker, and always seems to have more money than the average FBI agent. Both men are great characters—Coldmoon curses in Lakota and prefers “tarry black” coffee that Pendergast likens to “poison sumac” and “battery acid.” They wonder about the earlier deaths and whether the women had really hanged themselves. For answers they require exhumations, new autopsies, and a medical examiner’s close examinations of the hyoid bones. Meanwhile the deeply troubled killer ponders his next action, which he hopes will one day wipe away his pain and guilt and bring atonement. Alligators, bullets, and a sinkhole contribute to a nerve-wracking finish.
Readers will love the quirky characters in this clever yarn. Pendergast and Coldmoon make an excellent pair.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4720-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
A thriller with an intellectual bent, Golden's latest effort ruminates on the nature and existence of good and evil while...
Far up on Turkey's Mount Ararat, buried within it like a cave, explorers discover the remains of a ship they think may be Noah's Ark. After they open an odd sarcophaguslike container and mess around with the horned cadaver inside, evil happens.
Unafraid of ascending Ararat, with its threat of storms and avalanches and altitudinal challenges, Adam Holzer and his fiancee, Meryam Karga, take on the mountain with plans of co-writing another of their exploring bestsellers and shooting a documentary. From the start, there are tensions between the couple and among their multinational, multiethnic crew. One biblical scholar, a priest, is in favor of opening the coffin and finding "the greatest connection to biblical history we have ever found." Another scholar insists that "some things are better left buried." And then there's Ben Walker from the National Science Foundation, who hopes the 5,000-year-old cadaver proves to be an actual demon to “confirm the existence of God." It's not a good sign when people start disappearing. Things get even hairier when certain expeditioners start acting like they are possessed—which, in fact, they are. When a blizzard does, indeed, trap everyone in the cave, heightening their paranoia, they struggle as much for sanity as survival. Likely inspired by the claustrophobic film thriller The Thing, Golden (Dead Ringers, 2015, etc.) tightens the screws slowly but surely. While there are times the participants succumb to a group mania reminiscent of another film, The Poseidon Adventure, the book mostly works in an eerier and subtler manner.
A thriller with an intellectual bent, Golden's latest effort ruminates on the nature and existence of good and evil while providing the chills and tingles fans of this prolific author have come to expect.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11705-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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