A colorful and immersive comic tale about the transformation of a family ranch.
Big changes are in the works for a down-and-out Texas dude ranch in this literary novel.
Sally Rideout returned to the Rocking R ranch six months ago after years away. Now she manages the Texas property for her father, trying to keep the old dude ranch in the black while living in an ancient Airstream trailer out back. One day, after a morning run, she meets Kenneth Robinson, a guest who has come to the ranch with his two young horse-loving daughters. Kenneth runs a New Age–y spiritual institute in Austin—“We put on workshops about peak performance, finding the right livelihood…esoteric stuff like that”—and he thinks the Rocking R might be a great place to hold some of his organization’s retreats. That night, Sally’s father, JW, is attending a professional wrestling match. The lines between performer and audience get a little blurry, and JW ends up punching a wrestler in the face. This leads to an unexpected arrangement between JW and two of the wrestlers: tag-team journeymen Billy “The Kid” Hargis and Sterling Spencer, who are tired of traveling around the country and like Texas just fine. They ask JW to be their promoter, and he agrees, hoping to turn the Rocking R into a wrestlers’ training camp. But can one ranch play host to a bunch of rambunctious wrestlers and a group of yoga-loving peaceniks? Pounds’ (Grand Finale, 2019) prose animates his characters and their foibles with precision and understated humor: “Sally stared at him with all the spite she could muster. JW was shooting another of her plans in the foot, and she was tired of it. Having JW around was sometimes harder than raising a child. Or even a champion pig.” The plot is fueled by the dynamics of the many eclectic personalities that make up the ranch’s extended community, and readers will enjoy spending time in their collective presence. The book’s only flaw is that it’s easily a hundred pages too long (and maybe even more), which creates some lag in the pacing. That said, rambling yarns like this one can perhaps be forgiven when they meander a bit too far.
A colorful and immersive comic tale about the transformation of a family ranch.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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