Worthwhile vignettes for the New Yorker in all of us.
A collection of short fiction set in, and sometimes evocative of, New York.
In his inaugural effort, Lawenda gathers four short stories and two novellas in a disparate collection set against the backdrop of New York, which provides not only a theatrical stage, but mood and tenor. In Magnificent Melinda, the first novella, Michael returns to his family’s summer home on Katogah Lake and remembers the first time he met his uncle’s young bride, Melinda. Then only 14, he was instantly drawn to her untamed spirit. Years later, after Melinda and his uncle Sammy have split, Michael bumps into her in Tribeca, and they quickly begin a torrid romance that eventually concludes, to Michael’s eternal disappointment. In the aftermath of her death, he revisits the scene of their first encounter and grapples with the meaning of the extraordinary power she still has over him. In “Lunch with Louie,” Steve is crushed by the lack of purpose and shame that torment him after he loses his job and can’t find another. He spends his afternoons aimlessly wandering Madison Square Park, and his marriage starts to crumble under the weight of his growing torpor. Then, one day, he bumps into an old business associate experiencing a similar crisis. In the final novella, Translation, Chella flees Colombia to become a translator in New York. She reluctantly turns to prostitution to make ends meet and encounters Anthony, who rekindles her love of art, introduces her to a rarified world of wealth, and restores some hope lost in love itself. Besides the New York locations, the narrative twine that connects these stories is a confrontation with despair as well as the opportunities for redemption within that personal darkness. Lawenda beautifully captures the revitalization that can sometimes spring from a date with the abyss. One could argue that these pieces don’t powerfully capture the inimitable flavor of the city; the mood is wistful and somber in most stories, when a soupçon of humor might have lightened readers’ load. Still, the overall emotional intelligence of the collection is notable, and the unadorned prose delivers its message with a Spartan power.
Worthwhile vignettes for the New Yorker in all of us.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Peppertree Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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