Riveting time periods tied together by a delightfully eccentric protagonist.
An angel tries to save the grim alternate world she’s inadvertently created in Fraser’s (The Witch of the Hills, 2018, etc.) fantasy.
After witnessing the horror of the Hiroshima bombing, Angel Gabriella decides to make a change. Believing the source of trouble is religion, as many varieties are “magnets for violence,” she travels back nearly 2,000 years via the World of Mortal Dreams. She uses dreams and persuasion to convince someone to eliminate one particular religion’s founder, but a return to the 1940s reveals nothing has changed. Gabriella learns her actions have split the world in two, and a couple millennia later, the alternate universe is no better than the original. The other world may need a messiah, and Gabriella finds one in each world: Carla and Maynya. Evidently, splitting the universe also split souls, and the angel plans to reunite the girls’ souls. A strategy slowly forms, involving Carla’s death in 2012 and a man in the original world named Brewster DeLay, who, like Carla, has a counterpart in the other. Brewster and Carla meet in dreams (they’re separated by time; he’s one year into her future). But as they both fall for each other, they may search for a way to cheat death. Though Fraser’s story lingers on Brewster and Carla’s developing relationship, it also bounces between worlds with ease. Gabriella, who retains the appearance of a young girl, is fascinating. She sees signs from God but acknowledges mistakes, and there’s even a question of what she genuinely is: an angel, fallen angel, or something else. Fraser takes the material seriously and openly addresses religion without deriding or criticizing any specific one. Lightening things up, however, is radiant prose: “Falling leaves paint-gunned the lawns in a variety of autumn colors. He caught a whiff of burning brush, a seasonal fragrance saying trick or treat.” There are few surprises, but the story picks up in the final act when characters in both time periods ultimately converge.
Riveting time periods tied together by a delightfully eccentric protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 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
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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