A leisurely paced story filled with insights that will leave readers musing as much as the characters.
Fate seems to be directing the lives of people with varying connections to a Florida federal prosecutor’s rape in this debut drama.
The morning after someone brutally attacks and rapes attorney Estella Verus, she’s shocked to learn that cops have arrested her son Andrew as an accomplice. The 20-year-old man is a bright, athletic college graduate but with his share of troubles, having already faced charges of LSD possession. Police theorize that Andrew told the assailant his mother was home alone and where to find the gun used in the attack, but Estella refuses to believe that Andrew’s guilty. The story spins off into the lives of correlating characters, including Georges Bohem, one of Andrew’s lawyers, and Estella’s boss, Aurora Goldin. Georges was enamored with Aurora years ago in high school, and since then his relationships and marriage have fizzled out. Others are linked to the rape victim via the legal system: Estella, post-attack, is prosecuting Ismael Erasmus, who (supposedly) brought stolen diamonds into the United States—stones that reputed courier Andrew failed to deliver. Before Andrew was even born, his great-grandmother Sarah Abiaka, a Seminole medicine woman, predicted that the boy would be evil, like his father, and someday hurt Estella. But even if no one can escape the past, one character, who may have seen what’s to come, hopes to do the unthinkable: change the future. The novel initially feels like short stories, repeatedly switching characters and first/third-person perspectives. Jordan deftly retains comprehension throughout, an impressive feat because flashbacks often start with nary a warning. There’s an abundance of characters philosophizing, courtesy of a variety of beliefs from astronomy to shamanism. The story treats each deferentially, spotlighting firm believers such as Estella’s aunt Charlotte Crow, who’s certain that Andrew’s power animal, Eagle, has taken the young man’s voice. Jordan’s narrative occasionally slips into cold detachment: one chapter is, verbatim, a court document related to Andrew’s case. Descriptions, nevertheless, are primarily images that Jordan sears onto the pages. Neurologist Dr. Ras Demeke, for example, dreams of “children climbing over corpses, searching for their parents, unable to find them.”
A leisurely paced story filled with insights that will leave readers musing as much as the characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Turning Leaf Books
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2016
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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