A robust and often hilarious, if somewhat slow-paced, bildungsroman.
Tooley’s comic debut novel follows the anarchic misadventures of a gang of boys coming-of-age in Arizona’s Sonora Desert in the late 1960s.
Twelve-year-old narrator Johnny Caruso and his raucous friends make up the Seward School Bombers, or “the SBB.” Its main missions are to punish self-righteous tattletales, keep girls in their place, and generally buck the system. The novel’s episodic first half establishes the motley crew’s ethos as they glide from one catastrophic prank to the next without any consequences. In a series of exploits worthy of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, the boys detonate explosives at the home of a school nuisance, make tennis-ball bazookas out of tin cans, confront a tough rival gang known as The Losers, and crash a meeting of the Pueblo Junior Debutantes and Young Gentleman’s Academy to devastating effect. The novel gets much-needed narrative traction when the boys take up a new hobby: ghost hunting at the historic, dilapidated Mansfield Place. But as the boys get closer to obtaining evidence of old Mr. Mansfield’s apparition, Johnny’s domestic life intrudes. His younger sister, Gracie, insists on tagging along, resulting in an emergency meeting of the SBB’s disciplinary council. With Johnny’s fealty to the gang in question, the stakes become even higher to solve the mystery. When the gang members discover a person in distress, it offers them a chance for redemption; they all consider their moral beliefs, and the extent to which they’re willing to take risks when it matters most. Johnny’s narrative voice is generally engaging and folksy. At times, though, it seems disingenuous, as when Johnny describes a savant: “This one poor fella, who hardly knew where the heck he was, could listen to a Baytoevan conchairtoe just once, and then, lickety-split, play the whole thing.” Such passages seem at odds with the author’s beautifully lyrical, and pointedly mature, descriptions of Arizona landscape (“The Palo Verdes were practically dripping in bright yellow blossoms that were startling against the mostly gray surroundings”).
A robust and often hilarious, if somewhat slow-paced, bildungsroman.Pub Date: May 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481885867
Page Count: 422
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
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
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