A biting lampoon of espionage and politics that’s sometimes perplexing but always delightful.
Decades after her teenage affair with a president-to-be, a woman dodges politicos and terrorists in Jones’ debut satire.
U.S. Sen. Marcus Maitland has 45-year-old research attorney Lily Gentille and former U.S. president Harrison G. Huntley III in his cross hairs after he gets hold of a partially redacted classified document that apparently exposes their secret affair. More than 25 years earlier, Lily was a high school senior on a Washington, D.C., trip with her class. In a hotel lobby, she found herself in the vicinity of two men discussing an illegal fundraising scheme. One of these men, Maj. Gen. Dudley Peyton, was sure that she heard something essential, so he showed up later at Lily’s house in Hamilton Springs (a suburb in the nearby, fictional state of Franklin), posing as a repairman. While he was there, Lily got her hands on one of his incriminating documents. Now, it seemed, everyone believed that she had important information. She became a “target teenager,” watched by some government operatives, approached by others—which ultimately led to her having a sexual relationship with then-60-year-old Secretary of Diplomatic Services Huntley. Soon, everyone is focusing on this dalliance, even after Huntley’s presidency ends. Lily, who calls herself “just a girl with crappy karma,” spends years enduring abductions and assaults and even embarks on another affair. Jones’ tale is jam-packed with plot and often feels like a sprint. But although it sets an impressive pace, it sometimes skimps on detail; Lily recalls random attacks by terrorists in sections that seem like mere snippets, for example. It’s clear that Lily is special, as she has the ability to fly (and land) a jet and also possesses fighting skills apparently derived from exercise videos; however, it’s never explained why she doesn’t understand the concern over her relationship with an ex-president. Jones’ satirical angle is sublimely understated, as when characters seem more concerned about Lily being a president’s lover than the fact that she’s an “accidental spy.” The protagonist is also humbly sentimental at times, seeing her love for the current man in her life as perhaps her greatest achievement.
A biting lampoon of espionage and politics that’s sometimes perplexing but always delightful.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 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
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
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