A one-of-a-kind mystery that will appeal most to a niche audience of hosta aficionados.
In this mystery, a gardener unravels the story of what happened to his missing friend with some help from an unusual source.
Herman Funk—“Funky” to those who know him well—is an unassuming man with a passion for hosta plants. His life as a professional gardener is mostly one of quiet activity as he tends to his clients’ foliage and tries to warn people about the dangers of climate change. Then he starts hearing disembodied voices as he works in the garden. The messages seem to be a riddle he’s meant to solve, but who, or what, is sending them? And could they be somehow connected to the mysterious disappearance of Funky’s former client, Elisabeth Burgess, a decade prior? Meanwhile, a Mexican immigrant named Demetrio Perez gets ensnared in the mystery when he starts working for a sketchy character who’s also a hosta fanatic. Henry (Writing Workplace Cultures, 2000) subtitles his debut work of fiction “a magical realist gardening mystery,” and it’s an appropriate description for this quirky, creative novel. In it, hostas are revealed to be sentient beings with a complex, nuanced system of communication. The author writes numerous chapters from these plants’ perspectives, and they have personalities as varied as the humans who tend them. Along the way, Henry also weaves in plenty of details about the care and planting of hostas. (The author serves on the board of the American Hosta Society, and the book was first serialized in that society’s online journal.) His efforts will surely delight fellow hosta enthusiasts, and those who know little about the popular perennials will come away with a greater knowledge of them. There are plenty of hosta jokes along the way; when a character asks Funky what he thinks of Spilt Milk, a hosta variety, Funky replies, “No sense crying over it.” Unfortunately, the novel spends so much time delving into the details of rearing hostas that it takes a while for the core mystery to get going. However, patient readers will be rewarded with a unique whodunit that touches on important environmental issues.
A one-of-a-kind mystery that will appeal most to a niche audience of hosta aficionados.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 566
Publisher: Cedarwood Press
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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