An artful emotional drama undermined by overly familiar self-help tropes.
A supernatural novel follows the attempt of an unborn soul to find a path to reincarnation.
Caroline Martin is 45 years old, and in preparation for life after full-time motherhood—her youngest son has just graduated from high school—she plans to have a hysterectomy. But she’s overwhelmed by sadness and doubt, becoming slow to accept that she’ll never have another child. What she doesn’t know is that she’s actually pregnant— Fiona Carlisle, a nurse, inadvertently mixed up her medical records with those of another hospital patient. Meanwhile, Mary Anne Maynard struggles to survive as she brings her own baby to term after she’s savagely beaten and then shot by her chronically abusive boyfriend, Vito Gamboa. Hovering above the earthly drama is a disembodied old soul—rendered spiritually advanced after numerous reincarnations—looking for an opportunity to be reborn. That soul has a long-standing and profound connection to Caroline and pines to be born as her child, risking grave consequences by delaying a commitment to another host. Overseeing this crisis are two spiritual guides—Thor and Aurora—intervening in myriad subtle ways to help the soul safely find a suitable home. Mary Anne manages to give birth to a healthy baby girl and names her Rachael on Caroline’s suggestion—the two briefly share a hospital room. But Vito is still on the loose and can’t bear the thought of “anyone other than himself getting custody of his own daughter.” His implacable rage ultimately forces Mary Anne’s and Caroline’s lives to fatefully collide yet again. Rebhan (Finding Tranquility Base, 2012) skillfully braids several plotlines into a coherent fabric. In addition, her writing is reliably clear, if mottled with shopworn New Age clichés: “She felt an immense presence of love and peace and felt drawn into the light.” There’s no shortage of high drama in this relatively brief novel as well as plenty of climactic violence for a story driven by otherworldly preoccupations. Problematically, the tale seems designed to impart a spiritual lesson of some kind—the plot reads like a self-consciously styled parable. But it’s never clear what the lesson is precisely given the vague talk of “higher selves” and “higher dimensions.”
An artful emotional drama undermined by overly familiar self-help tropes.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-868-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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