An ambitious if somewhat meandering addition to one of the more successful zombie franchises.
A reanimated zombie must fill in the pieces of his missing past in this doorstopper sequel to Warm Bodies (2011).
To recap, Marion (The New Hunger, 2015, etc.) penned a clever zom-rom-com in his previous books, set during a zombie apocalypse and starring a hunky young zombie named R. Weirdly, our boy starts to regain his humanity when he falls for Julie, a still-living survivor (after making a snack of her boyfriend, Perry Kelvin, as one does). This first of multiple planned sequels picks up immediately afterward and quickly goes off the rails. In the beginning, R is still the blank slate from the first book. “Whatever past lives return to me and whatever other names they bring, this is the one that matters,” he says. “My first life fled without a fight and left nothing behind, so I doubt it was a loss worth mourning." The living are settled into an unsteady truce with the dead, their new animations explained by a gimmicky plot device called “the Gleam.” “Every once in a while it just...happens, and the Dead get a little less dead.” Their settlement quickly comes under siege from a corporate militant group called Axiom, while other rumors spread of a religious group called the Fire Church. R, Julie, R’s buddy Marcus, and the rest of their crew escape with the help of—surprise! —Abram Kelvin, the older brother of the boyfriend whose brains R wolfed down. From there, it’s a cross-country journey to a scorched Helena, Montana; on to Detroit, where Julie frees her chained-up, zombified mother; assaulting an Axiom facility in Pittsburgh; and finally, on to New York City to face not the big bad Axiom but the inevitable cliffhanger. We do get the full back story on R’s background, although fans of the character may be disappointed by some pretty manipulative twists. Still, Marion has ambitiously expanded on his original tale, offering a dramatic amount of mythology and worldbuilding to flesh out his murky world.
An ambitious if somewhat meandering addition to one of the more successful zombie franchises.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9971-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A smooth blend of suspense and romance. As ever, the author's trademark effortless style keeps a complex plot moving without...
Megaselling Roberts (River's End, 1999, etc.) goes to Napa Valley for the tale of an Italian-American family wine producers rocked by scandal and a series of murders.
Dynasty head Tereza Giambelli knows that her granddaughter Sophia is the only family member capable of running a multimillion-dollar wine business—and no one contradicts La Signora. It's just as well the lovely young woman is still single: Tereza has plans for her. The matriarch has recently married Eli MacMillan, the American founder of another famous wine company. Eli's grandson Tyler knows everything there is to know about producing wine, from the vineyard to the vat. Ruggedly handsome, intelligent and earthy, he's a perfect match for public-relations whiz Sophia—or so thinks Tereza. The two young people begin to work together; Tyler teaches Sophia the fine art of making wine and making love. But other family members hope to claim their share of the Giambelli fortune, and people start dying mysteriously, including Sophia's good-for-nothing father, Tony Avano. Long divorced from long-suffering Pilar Giambelli, Tony led an opulent, self-indulgent life that provides plenty of murder suspects. He might have been killed by the mob, or a jealous mistress, or his spoiled brother-in-law, Tereza's lazy son, who's produced a passel of brats with his foolish Italian wife in the hopes of making Tereza happy. Everyone has a motive, and nothing is what it seems, Sophia discovers, but Tyler stands by her. Then a bottle of tainted merlot kills a company exec. A tragic mishap caused by poisonous plants growing near the vines? Or deliberate product tampering intended to destroy the company? Sophia and Tyler will need to delve even deeper into the convoluted and sometimes unsavory history of the family and its three-generation business.
A smooth blend of suspense and romance. As ever, the author's trademark effortless style keeps a complex plot moving without a hitch.Pub Date: March 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14712-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.
The husband-and-wife team who have given us refreshing English versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov now present their lucid translation of Tolstoy's panoramic tale of adultery and society: a masterwork that may well be the greatest realistic novel ever written. It's a beautifully structured fiction, which contrasts the aristocratic world of two prominent families with the ideal utopian one dreamed by earnest Konstantin Levin (a virtual self-portrait). The characters of the enchanting Anna (a descendant of Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest, and forerunner of countless later literary heroines), the lover (Vronsky) who proves worthy of her indiscretion, her bloodless husband Karenin and ingenuous epicurean brother Stiva, among many others, are quite literally unforgettable. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this splendid translation is the skill with which it distinguishes the accents of Anna's romantic egoism from the spare narrative clarity with which a vast spectrum of Russian life is vividly portrayed.
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89478-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
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