An offbeat but overlong story of a romantic relationship.
In Crowell’s (Etched on Me, 2014, etc.) novel, two long-distance friends admit their love for each other without fully considering the psychological consequences.
Washington, D.C., resident Gloria Burgess has survived her first year of widowhood. On the anniversary of her husband Bill’s death from leukemia, she sends her 8-year-old son, Curran, away to a sleepover, and the apartment is all hers to have a good cry. Her overwhelming stress is apparent when her best friend, Jascha Kremsky, calls from England: “There’s a stranger in the mirror,” she tells him. “She looks like me, and she moves when I move, but she’s not me.” Fearing that Gloria will harm herself, Jascha convinces her to go to the emergency room, ending the call with a whispered “I love you.” She submits to a psychiatric hold for the weekend, and the doctor tells her that she’ll need extensive therapy to process her loss. But her memory of Jascha’s whispered declaration makes her desperately need to see him. He immediately flies in from Europe, and they realize that they both desire to have more than a mere friendship. But Jascha is still suffering from severe PTSD due to his family’s death in a car crash five years before. The fact of their mutual tragedies, in fact, had helped him and Gloria to cement their friendship. But Jascha quickly scraps his decision to stay in the United States in order to return to England for his own extensive therapy; for their love to truly flourish, they’ll both need to work through their grief. Crowell’s fiction draws heavily on themes of mental illness and the concomitant social stigma attached to its diagnosis; her main characters don’t merely experience passing depressions but have chronic conditions that require professional intervention. Indeed, the novel’s focus on mental health is one of its strengths, as it’s a refreshing and underrepresented subject in fiction. However, the book offers chapter after chapter depicting the lengthy process of therapeutic desensitization exercises, which results in an overly long novel. Crowell has a gift for characterization, and Curran and other supporting characters do emerge as fully developed people, but one will wish that more pages were devoted to them instead of to details of therapy sessions.
An offbeat but overlong story of a romantic relationship.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Carnelian Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2017
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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