A meandering cowboy tale.
A rugged ranch hand shakes up life in a quiet Montana town in this novel.
Lance Turbyfill is a 51-year-old outdoorsman hoping to make a new start—things have gone south in Winnemucca, Nevada, where he lived with a disabled, surly friend and his beautiful wife. He takes a job at the Oliver Ranch in Rusty Springs, Montana, where Joy Ann Oliver and her friends (especially Stormy Smith, a single woman desperate to find a man) impatiently await his arrival. Slowly, Lance begins to settle into his new life—he explores the wild hills around the ranch; treats one of his visiting paramours, a glamorous woman named Ferris, to dancing and a buffet; and briefly gets involved with Stormy. Meanwhile, Joy Ann’s husband, Larry, catches wind that the troublemaking Hicks family has returned to Rusty Springs and he grows vengeful; the clan once planted a bomb in the Olivers’ mailbox. Lance leaves for something called The Gathering, where he reunites with his Nevada friends and becomes smitten with a woman named Alexis, who helps him work through his lingering Vietnam War trauma. He brings Alexis back to the ranch, but she soon tells him she must leave. Then a record-setting heat wave rolls through the area, sparking massive wildfires that throw the whole town into crisis and set off a chain of events that mobilize Lance, the Olivers, and all their friends to protect their town from the conflagration and the nefarious Hicks family. Bender (Lebensborn Secrets, 2017, etc.) tells this tale with an appealing folksiness and shows an especially deft hand for simile: a building in the story “had so many additions that it looked like a mother duck folding her wings over a flock of rambling ducklings.” But the plot is scattered and uneven. Some of the narrative threads, including one involving a red-haired woman who abandons a mountain cabin, lead nowhere; the Gathering that Lance goes to, whose purpose is “to foster worldwide peace, cooperation, and spiritual healing,” is a bewildering digression. And while kidnappings, near-death experiences, and the mighty, destructive forces of nature befall the protagonists, they resolve these problems without any real struggle or dramatic tension.
A meandering cowboy tale.Pub Date: April 27, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Bender Associates
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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