A solid man-at-a-crossroads story.
The destinies of a man with a brain tumor, a gambler, a pimp, and a Native American teenager converge on the Grand Canyon in this debut novel.
Struggling with a dying marriage, unsuccessful career, and the recent diagnosis of a brain tumor, business traveler Raymond “Ray” Leonard finds himself disembarking with other passengers in Las Vegas instead of continuing to Los Angeles. As a child, Ray had a near-death experience falling from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, a terrifying event that now seems to call to him. To hike into a remote part of the canyon, he’ll need money; luckily, he hits it off with gambler/sometime prostitute Antoinette Polasek, called Annie. They work together to parlay their cash into a tidy sum at the casinos, becoming close in the process. Annie is being harassed by Winston Culpepper, a strong-arming pimp. Ray and Johnny Valentine (Annie’s protective older neighbor) drive him off but don’t kill him, a lapse that leads to greater destruction down the road. Ray heads off to the Grand Canyon, where a 15-year-old Native American, Augustine Watahomigie, is on a power quest. His grandfather, a noted healer, wants him to learn more of the old ways, which appeals to Augustine despite his other ambition: becoming a rapper. Unknown to Ray, Culpepper is after him, using Annie and her disabled younger sister as leverage. With all their paths leading to the canyon, tragedy ensues and lives are changed. In his novel, Pounds might be accused of relying on two overused tropes, in which less-powerful characters—here, a good-hearted gambler/occasional sex worker and some Native Americans—come to the rescue of a needy white man. Augustine is mystically called to help Ray, for example, but why he especially deserves this isn’t clear. That said, the author takes the trouble to develop backstories and point-of-view sections for his nonwhite, non-male characters, which makes them more three-dimensional. Ray, too, gains gravitas in his struggles to come to terms with his mortality, giving the book an uplifting ending. In addition, the plot is well paced and the locations are vividly described.
A solid man-at-a-crossroads story.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2019
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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