A tragic and darkly fascinating call girl story that loses some of its edge by trying too hard to get into its main...
In this novel, the diary of a troubled young girl reveals her life as a prostitute while her therapist lusts after her and tries to learn her secrets.
Ripley Luna dates her college professor, endures nightmares about murdering puppies, and secretly works as a high-class call girl. “A competent courtesan has the ability to converse on a myriad of subjects,” Ripley writes in her diary as she flits from references to the Marquis de Sade to The X-Files, Greek mythology, and her favorite subject, astronauts. While she begins filling pages with her true thoughts, she lies to her new therapist, Dr. Dan Truscott. “Lying is what I do, more so than even laying, lol,” she writes. As Ripley’s journal moves from encounters with her sweetest johns to the ordeals of her childhood, Dan’s obsession with his young patient grows, leading him to follow her after sessions and even to hire a private investigator. He claims to want to protect her, fearing for her safety, but deep down he knows it has more to do with his own disintegrating marriage. Ripley’s own romantic relationship begins to come apart as she and Dan move forward with her psychotherapy. Desperate to understand her, he pushes her more and more toward revisiting the mysterious traumas of her past that have scarred her for life and given her an inclination for suicide. Ullman (Hit or Miss, 2013, etc.) strives for the irreverent, acerbic observations found in Sylvia Plath’s works or Susanna Kaysen’s Girl Interrupted, but Ripley’s first-person narration unfortunately falls short. A glut of lols and unwieldy pop-culture references doesn’t make Ripley feel young or sharp, but instead turns an already unreliable narrator into an unbelievable and uneven character. It’s actually in the cat-and-mouse dialogues with Dan—narrated in the third person—that Ripley really comes to life, and Ullman also seems more comfortable building Dan’s budding obsession. These elements could have been explored more to make the book’s later and more haunting aspects feel less forced.
A tragic and darkly fascinating call girl story that loses some of its edge by trying too hard to get into its main character’s head.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Moonshine Cove Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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