A good adventure story undercut by its dated point of view.
Refusing to return to Earth after the International Space Station is badly damaged, American astronaut Walli Beckwith stages an unthinkable one-woman protest against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.
A malfunction has caused a cargo vehicle to collide with the space station, seriously injuring one of Beckwith's two Russian crew mates. Blowing off both Houston and Moscow, who guarantee she will serve a long prison term if she disobeys orders to make the return trip, she draws the wrath of world powers invested in the space station. And in lobbying the U.S. government to cancel Brazil's new "consolidation" policy, which is to set massive fires in the jungle to clear out tens of thousands of tribespeople, she creates political trouble for the two-faced, misogynistic American president. He wants no part of any intervention even when he says he does. Her campaign, which makes her a sensation on social media, resonates most strongly with her niece Sonia, a young volunteer doctor in the rainforest tending to the sick and homeless. Kluger, a Time veteran who has written several books about space including Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 (1994) with astronaut James Lovell, fuels the narrative with fascinating technical details. And the action scenes, including a spacewalk in which a fever-ridden Beckwith must repair a coolant system leaking lethal ammonia, are pretty gripping. But the heroine is mostly a collection of righteous intentions, and with the exception of a 5-year-old Guarani boy in Sonia's loving care, Kluger gives no voice to the tribespeople, presenting them as faceless victims.
A good adventure story undercut by its dated point of view.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18469-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Deliciously dark and twistedly funny.
A desperate woman devises a killer strategy for snagging the home of her dreams.
After losing 11 bidding wars, Margo Miyake goes full-on Fatal Attraction in a knockout debut novel that sets the pace for domestic suspense set in the world of competitive home-buying. Margo, 37, isn’t even close to achieving her life goals, namely having a baby—she’s struggling with infertility—and buying a seven-figure home in a tony suburb of Washington, D.C. When she discovers that the perfect house will soon go up for sale, she decides she’ll get her hands on the place before it hits the market—no matter what. If that means infiltrating the lives of the current owners, then lying and blackmailing her way to closing the deal, she’s braced for battle. Fueled by nuclear-hot rage and frustration, Margo becomes the walking, talking nightmare the owners never saw coming, and neither do the people she uses and throws away in order to buy that house. Author Kashino, a longtime journalist who covered the real estate market for the Washington Post and Washingtonian magazine, has created in Margo a character as vicious and conniving as the jilted lover played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. The novel is wonderfully inventive, and readers will marvel at the workings of Margo’s devious mind as she claws her way into a brick colonial-style home whose wide-plank oak floors and Carrara marble countertops she’s ready to kill for. Behind the closed doors of the perfect dream home, Kashino paints a gimlet-eyed portrait of the allure of status and the greed for material wealth that turns at least one woman into a predatory monster.
Deliciously dark and twistedly funny.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781250400543
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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