A playful collection for romance readers who may wonder what the Greek gods are up to these days.
A slim but passionate debut story collection about modern men and women having passionate affairs with human incarnations of ancient Greek gods.
In one of these nine stories, a woman meets a chiseled doctor, nicknamed Apollo, who loves archery. In others, a lucky man picks up Venus, a too-gorgeous-to-be-true hitchhiker, and an American woman abroad in Israel takes up with a handsome, dark lover named Pluto. The stories’ circumstances run the gamut from basic romance (a divorced woman on a beach has a one-night-stand with Mercury) to strange encounters (a troubled hiker meets Mars and discovers a brewing war between two schools of philosophy). As readers might expect, the god characters almost always wield the power in these stories’ relationships. These power plays are most satisfying when they aren’t solely about romance, as in “Hestia,” in which an old inventor lives out his last days with a submissive female-robot housewife, until things go awry. In “Angerona,” a meditation student is chosen to head a summer retreat, only to have the haunting Rona appear at the Zen center and threaten her serenity. Using such lesser-known gods (Angerona, for example, is the “[g]oddess of silence, secrecy, meditation, and mystery”) seems to give Wong license for more creative reinventions. Other stories rely on the mammoth legends that the gods carry around with them; without their powerful histories, they would be simple human characters—the lover who disappears, the bad boyfriend, the manipulative man in one’s life. Fortunately, their heritages as Greek gods or goddesses influence the stories without overburdening them. The collection also uses an impressive diversity of locations (Hawaii, small orchestras, mountain ranges). Readers may feel that narrators are overly similar—women who want to fall in love, men who want to get the girl—but the collection’s Greek-god gambit allows each story to take a good, dark turn.
A playful collection for romance readers who may wonder what the Greek gods are up to these days.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 109
Publisher: Li-Jean Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2013
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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