A fascinating concept that’s not entirely well-executed but is worth the read.
When a man returns home to care for his dying father, he’s sucked into a vast conspiracy involving his estranged childhood best friend and a paranoid (or is he?) teenager at a mental hospital.
History teacher Jack Felter wanted to leave his whole past behind in Franklin Mills, Ohio—his first love, Samantha; his one-time closest confidant, Tony; his tangled family relationships—but when his father, nicknamed “The Captain,” spirals further into dementia, Jack leaves his new life in Cleveland to help his sister, Jean, with caregiving duties. The Captain, a former pilot and Vietnam vet, is lost in a fog of wartime memories, and Jack must contend with his father's diminishing capacity without the help of Tony, who disappeared three years before. A long-ago betrayal split the best friends and Sam apart, but Jack’s feelings for Sam burn hot, and he agrees to help her find Tony; his search leads him to Tony’s job at Haven Hospital and Tony’s last patient, 16-year-old Cole Monroe. It’s here that Renner (The Man from Primrose Lane, 2012, etc.) shifts to a more audacious storyline, one that not all readers will embrace. Cole draws Jack into a mysterious world of alternate histories centered on the Great Forgetting, where, for example, the Allies lost World War II, and time is reset every so often because larger malevolent forces control our collective minds. It’s heady stuff—Jack, Cole, and the Captain eventually set off for the mythical island of Mu, where the inhabitants still “remember” world events and where Tony might be hiding—and it doesn’t always succeed.
A fascinating concept that’s not entirely well-executed but is worth the read.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-29879-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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