A well-researched, multilayered historical novel with distracting dialogue.
An Indiana farm boy gets caught up with cardsharps, bushwhackers, and questions of morality during the Civil War.
In this historical novel, Zerr (Sundown Town Duty Station, 2017) introduces the reader to Emerson Sharp, a young adult chafing under his father’s yoke on an isolated Indiana farm in 1860. When Emerson gets in trouble over a girl, his father disowns him. He takes to the road on Horse, with whom he maintains a one-sided conversation. He eventually teams up with a many-named confidence man—Emerson eventually makes him settle on Weekes Daley—who becomes a surrogate father, teaching him about both books and human nature. Three years into their itinerant partnership, a tragedy occurs, and Emerson, blaming himself, ends up attached to a Southern paramilitary group, though he realizes the violence of Quantrill’s Raiders is more than he can handle. After being involved in civilian deaths, Emerson renames himself Tom Thackery and tries to make a new life in Missouri, but his past is never far behind. The deeply researched novel is set in a vividly depicted Civil War era full of primitive medicine, farm labor, and saloon life, and Emerson is a compelling protagonist, evolving over the course of the story to reach a satisfying conclusion against a backdrop of fully realized secondary characters. The dialogue is less well-done, relying on overly phonetic working class and immigrant speech: “Animals is dumb ’cause they’re borned that way and cain’t git much smarter”; “ven first vagon train leefes next spring, I leef, vedder you still be stupid about guns or not.” The portrayal of black characters borders on minstrelsy: “Da udder wommins, deh gadder roun’ an pull her back up agin by an by.” Despite the occasionally grating prose, on the whole, Zerr delivers a solid narrative.
A well-researched, multilayered historical novel with distracting dialogue.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2776-5
Page Count: 438
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
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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