by J.C. Mercer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 2016
An intriguing tale of a homeless drifter hoping to reinvent his life.
A suicidal young man decides to settle in New York’s subway tunnels with a band of vagrants.
In Mercer’s debut novel, Mays, a medical school dropout, finds himself homeless and broke after a failed suicide attempt. At the hospital, he meets Thomas “T-Bone” Bonicelli, who offers to help him escape without drawing the attention of the nurses. The two meet later at Saint Christopher All Souls Kitchen. After T-Bone finds out about Mays’ financial problems, he tells him, “We can’t have you walking around with no money like you’re some kinda bum on the street.” T-Bone earns cash by participating in “clinical trials in the pharmaceutical industry” and medical experiments. After T-Bone invites Mays to live in the “Bat Cave,” his underground home beneath the subway tunnels, Mays come to think of his new companion as a “surrogate quasi-father figure” and discovers that he has “something that had been missing for quite some time: a future.” Mays and T-Bone have their farts tested at a “clinical exercise testing facility,” become prostate exam test subjects for third-year medical students, and even sell their sperm on a weekly basis to avoid becoming destitute. Though Mercer doesn’t ever clearly state his main character’s motivations—why does he decide to trust T-Bone and go along with his schemes?—his strange tale of two men living off the grid is a fresh and vividly rendered take on the alternate lifestyle trope. Some readers may be put off by the author’s light treatment of mental illness and suicide—in one disturbing section, Mays considers all the ways he might try killing himself again—but Mercer’s goal seems to be to push boundaries past the acceptable and into the grotesque. Mays’ quest to find meaning should be familiar to those struggling to find direction in their own lives, but that may not be a good enough reason for readers to stick around for a character whose path and purpose seem to remain mysterious even to the author.
An intriguing tale of a homeless drifter hoping to reinvent his life.Pub Date: March 28, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
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Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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