The heart of this narrative about coping with loss rings powerfully true.
A novel about a ghostwriter offers an exercise in family, grief, and adjustment.
When her mother dies prematurely after a battle with cancer, Julia Clark is devastated. Years later, she still struggles to recover from the loss of a bond that always seemed unbreakable. Now a successful ghostwriter, Julia throws herself into her assignments as well as a novel that she hopes will lead to professional success under her own name. Until then, she passes the days with expert after expert—a leading psychoanalyst, a celebrity chef, a prima ballerina, and others—distilling their lives into future bestsellers while the world seems to have moved on without her. Her two sisters have families of their own; her father has started dating again. While her husband, Leo, is sweet and eternally supportive, her mother-in-law, Lilly, is anything but. A well-groomed woman with “detective-like eyes,” Lilly never misses a chance to interrogate Julia on when she plans on having children and why she won’t refer to her dear old mother-in-law as “Mom,” a well-meant sentiment that only succeeds in making Julia’s pain more acute. When a new expert guesses that Julia’s mother has died, she realizes that she won’t truly be able to move on until she makes peace with her loss. The author’s prose is polished and evocative: “A ghostwriter must drown her own self and let her imagination live a completely different life.” As a result, Julia’s voice is clear and inviting, a wry observer suffering a near-universal loss. Indeed, the narrative is strongest when lingering on the ways in which Julia mourns: a beautifully rendered memory of “Mom’s wrists…buried in the bowl as she mixed and mashed the tomatoes by hand” evoked by a day spent shadowing a celebrity chef or the moment when Julia takes inspiration from her mother to play a trick on Leo. In contrast, Julia’s experiences as a ghostwriter sometimes feel out of sync tonally, and the two threads struggle at times to complement each other. Still, Swan (Dear Isabelle, 2007, etc.) renders the desolation of mourning exceedingly well.
The heart of this narrative about coping with loss rings powerfully true.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Odette Books
Review Posted Online: March 9, 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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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