An outstanding collection of tales with delightfully diverse and memorable characters.
A debut volume of short stories features individuals in realistic, if uncompromising, situations.
The 11 tales in Nagler’s collection encompass the kinds of relatable themes readers will recognize, like survival, longing, connection, grief, and the bonds of family, with each playing out across America’s wind-swept dairy landscape and beyond. The tender, intimate opener, “Ponty Bayswater,” chronicles the beautifully fluid love life of a war veteran and insurance salesman who learned about the mechanics of sexuality at age 12 from his “loopy Aunt Violet.” Readers will get a sense of the author’s uncanny knack for intriguing characterization from her description of Violet, who spoke with a “nicotine bark” and sported “pink cat-eye glasses with fake diamonds, had a head of tightly curled gray and black hair and wore bright red lipstick, even at home.” The evolution of families forms the framework for other stories, like “Asa at the Foundry,” in which passion and pain bloom amid “stupid summer heat.” In “Maximus,” a Mexican son transcends cultures when he immigrates to America by car trunk. The pain of parental loss is brilliantly captured in “Fishing,” as a daughter’s grief is only soothed by her desire to remember her father by fishing in the Wolf River. The most moving stories encapsulate the epiphany felt by characters who discover love in unexpected places. The callousness of a perfume journalist’s mean boyfriend in “Leaving Lefty” forces him to reevaluate how he recovers from broken relationships to better appreciate “who is there to love me and let me love them back.” Among the collection’s shorter, more potent tales is the unforgettably gritty, nine-page yarn “Claire Rose,” which portrays how a traumatized wife processes a horrific ordeal involving her child. Nagler sketches in the difficult details of healing and the grief and anger that eventually yield to places where “pink flowers come up year after year without being asked, in a place they’re not supposed to grow.” Whether the stories concern age, death, cruelty, or love, the author creates bold, authentic characters with no choice but to adapt to circumstances they’d never expected in order to proceed with strength and grace. Orbited by players who are bound by mortality, ancestry, pathos, and perseverance, this emotionally satisfying volume becomes a sublime, interconnected wonder.
An outstanding collection of tales with delightfully diverse and memorable characters.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Coyote Point Press
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
