An insightful and often beautiful look into a sentimental corner of America’s past.
A young man encounters eccentrics while running an old junkyard in 1980s Vermont in this slice-of-life novel.
Fresh out of college, Jules Alpert decides to move to Iraton, Vermont, where residents live by the maxim “You mind your business, and I’ll mind mine.” Jules is known for his hoarder tendencies, and he collects items that he thinks represent “whole categories of the undesired…ill-fated things that had once been treasured.” He purchases a ramshackle junkyard, with his realtor Aunt Martha, a hippie who sells marijuana on the side, brokering the deal. After buying the property, which sits on the edge of an unincorporated piece of land nicknamed “No Town,” Jules encounters several oddball locals, including Butchy Guyette, who can’t read but has handyman skills; Byron, a mute young boy whom Jules nearly runs over; and Maddy, Byron’s attractive sister, with whom Jules falls in love. While smoking pot, learning Vermont vernacular, and collecting junk, Jules nicely settles into his new life. But not everything is quaint in Iraton; for one thing, a car with a fortune’s worth of cocaine hidden inside it makes its way to Jules’ junkyard. Its owners are desperately searching for it, and they bring danger with them. Later, Jules and his friends ultimately witness a miracle that makes them realize just how special Iraton is. In this debut novel, Myers presents a rich world while also paying tribute to the sleepy charm of rural Vermont and to America’s automotive history. In an author’s note, Myers explains that Iraton is fictitious, but he makes the town feel incredibly real with lush descriptions of greenery and carefully crafted characters. He nails the distinctive Vermont dialect in his dialogue (“Might’s well make yourself cozy, bein’ as you’ll be living here”), which is entertaining to parse as Jules adjusts to it. Although the sheer number of characters may be overwhelming at first, the novel fluidly brings them together, and they quickly feel like a genuine group of friends. Overall, this is a distinctive reading experience that sincerely expresses how one should appreciate overlooked things.
An insightful and often beautiful look into a sentimental corner of America’s past.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2020
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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