A gripping tale of marital difficulty intertwined with pallid love affairs.
A widow haunted by the tragic end of her marriage gets her groove back while on a Scottish sojourn in this knotty romance.
Six months after her husband Marc’s death from complications of a stroke, 40-something Wisconsin novelist Heather Finch embarks on an eight-week retreat in Scotland to finish her latest Millicent Monvail mystery and reconnect with John Timmer, an old middle school flame and current sky diving instructor who lives nearby. As she says goodbye to her college-age kids—Jackson, a kindly organic-farming enthusiast, and Tessa, a perpetually put-out handful—Heather’s story splits into two interleaved narratives. One is a love triangle at the White Cottage at Scotland’s Ardorn Estate, where Heather is wooed by John, who takes her strawberry-picking, and by Ardorn’s owner, Steven Connolly, who wines and dines and beds her with satisfactory, though not earthshaking, results. Mild spookiness occurs when she starts dreaming of a ghostly, blood-drenched woman, hears strange clinking noises, and finds her poetry book mysteriously moved around her cottage. The second, darker subplot revisits the three years that Heather, Jackson, and Tessa took care of the once-strong but now helpless Marc after his stroke. The burden exhausts them and is further complicated when Heather discovers that Marc was cheating on her; as his condition worsens, she confronts the agonizing thought that his death would be a relief. The two threads of Benjamin’s tale of midlife rebirth sit uneasily beside each other; Heather’s romances feel conventional and somewhat callow (“he leaned in, his lips at her left ear. ‘I’m going to slow dance with you tonight, my Swan Princess,’ he said”). However, Benjamin’s depiction of Heather’s family life in extremis is far more convincing, as in sharply etched scenes of mother-daughter conflict or passages of bleak endurance: “ ‘I’m fine. I’ll be down in a bit.’…Her head spun, but she drank again. Another drink. Another year. Another bathroom visit with Marc unable to care for himself.” As such, Benjamin’s portrait of Heather’s marriage has a raw emotional power that the ensuing Scottish flings can’t match.
A gripping tale of marital difficulty intertwined with pallid love affairs.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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