An uneven novel with a split personality, one-half of which is worthwhile.
In Sanders' debut, a late-in-life coming-of-age novel, a 33-year-old lawyer tries to escape the traumatic events of his childhood.
“I’m done with the past,” says Hank Anawatty. “I don’t think the past is done with you,” Hank’s friend Daniel Rosenthal replies. Readers meet Hank in 1987, during his first and only therapy session. He’s been fired from his job at a law firm for drinking, and his girlfriendhas mysteriously disappeared. When his therapist probes him about his childhood, Hank replies, “There is no relationship between that period of my life and my current problems.” However, readers later learn that Hank’s father has a terrible temper and is overly critical; that his mother died of Pick’s disease, a degenerative brain ailment, while he was young; that his first love dumped him; and that a childhood friend drowned in front of him. Still, Hank insists, “it did not affect me.” Yet his past keeps cropping up—even in dreams—and demands a reckoning. Sanders jumps between scenes set in 1987 and scenes further in Hank’s past; the latter are told in present tense, reinforcing the idea that those long-ago days are still very present to Hank. In fact, his past concerns feel more real and pressing: what will happen to Hank’s friendships when everyone parts ways for college? Will Hank find direction in life? Will he acknowledge his mother’s illness? The 1980s sections, however, are muddled by improbable legal cases, a subplot involving missing jewelry, and references to angels and past lives, among other elements.The only thing that truly links the various sections together is Hank’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge the emotional burden he bears; much of the rest of the action feels like filler, meant to ramp up the intrigue. Although many important events are only revealed in conversation after the fact, the scenes that Sanders does depict are well-drawn and sometimes approach moments of real insight regarding guilt and suffering.
An uneven novel with a split personality, one-half of which is worthwhile.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2020
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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