An over-the-top, often witty escape into fantasy that manages to convey some realistic poignancy on the road to a satisfying...
An emergency room nursing supervisor writes a romance novel, even as her own life spins out of control.
Skartsiaris’ (Surviving Life, 2016, etc.) third book offers a bit of a change-up on the standard romance genre, weaving together two stories that intersect in the chaotic world of the protagonist, Cassie Calabria. Cassie is approaching middle age, with her marriage stagnating. Her older daughter, Ashley, is 15 and an expert in distancing herself from her mother with silence and/or the perfected eye roll. Cassie has always wanted to be an author, and she decides that a romance novel is just the thing. In between managing life-and-death emergencies in the ER and running her household, she begins writing Wild Rose, under the pseudonym Cardia Loving, and she sets it in the 1970s (“when promiscuity was a badge of honor”). Rosemary “Rose” Christi is Cassie’s younger, more beautiful, sexier alter ego. Chapters of Cassie’s first-person narrative alternate with chapters of Wild Rose. While Rose gallivants around as a photojournalist, Cassie deals with a husband who wants a separation. The author artfully employs the use of humorous juxtaposition: Cassie trying to keep her daughter from experimenting with sex while simultaneously writing all manner of steamy adventures for Rose; Rose meeting a handsome film star at the beach and immediately engaging in hours of torrid sex, while Cassie frantically mops urine off the ER floor when she meets her real-life movie idol. When Wild Rose surprisingly becomes a best-seller, Cassie’s real and imaginary lives begin to collide, as she struggles to keep her pseudonymous identity a secret from family, co-workers, and adoring fans. In this amusing tale, both Cassie and Rose are strong female characters. Despite melodrama in the life of the former and the wildly exaggerated exploits of the latter, they come across as likable and self-sufficient (At one point, Cassie muses: “I chose nursing to help people, to be an angel of mercy, and the math was easier than medical school”). But the male characters are rather two-dimensional, serving more as foils or window dressing. Although the narrative contains plenty of graphic sex, it is generally mild for the genre. Still, the novel ultimately delivers a rewarding ending.
An over-the-top, often witty escape into fantasy that manages to convey some realistic poignancy on the road to a satisfying conclusion.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Black Opal
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
