A complex novel of the past and the future, fathers and sons, war and redemption, and the devastating impact of large-scale...
A Vietnam veteran wrestles with the demons of his war as his son goes off to fight in Iraq.
In this debut novel, Estes (A Field of Innocence, 1987) introduces Mike Kelly, an angry and occasionally violent Vietnam veteran–turned-journalist. His relationship with his teenage son Jake is fraught with conflict over sports and expectations, and Mike’s wife, Claire, is prepared to walk out if he continues to avoid getting needed treatment and therapy at the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital. In addition, Mike’s editor is losing patience with his inconsistent performance at the paper. When Jake joins the Marines, Mike wants to protect his son from repeating his wartime experiences but slowly accepts that he cannot stop the youth from deploying to Iraq in the early years of the war there. Instead, Mike decides to follow, traveling to the war zone as an embedded journalist. Jake resents his father’s presence, seeing it as one more attempt at controlling his life, but when the two are caught in a battle together, their relationship is strengthened through fighting side by side. Estes skillfully presents the effects of war on families, both in the moment (Claire and Jake’s girlfriend, Megs, are involved in anti-war protests) and decades after the conflict has ended, through the flashbacks and terrors that Mike contends with on a daily basis. The characters are rich and complex, with occasional bursts of witty dialogue (“Its classrooms are bulging with the leaders of tomorrow, who often are the smartasses of today”). Battle scenes are vividly drawn, keeping the reader caught up in the action (“Jake stops, sand beating at his front, kneels, and sets the butt of his gun in the sand, balancing it against his body”) and Estes’ firsthand knowledge of the experience of war. (The author is a Vietnam veteran.) At the same time, the locker-room nature of Jake’s conversations with his friends and the depiction of the Marines in Iraq can be excessive, closer to tedious vulgarity than to stark realism.
A complex novel of the past and the future, fathers and sons, war and redemption, and the devastating impact of large-scale violence on both the perpetrators and the victims.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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