The ending borrows unforgivably from a source it would be equally unforgivable to reveal.
A decade after the disappearance of an elephant researcher, her 13-year-old daughter, a washed-up private detective and a has-been psychic team up to find answers.
As in Lone Wolf, (2012) Picoult uses fiction to illustrate the plight of animals who are being decimated by humans, in this case elephants who are endangered by everything from poachers to circuses. Teenage Jenna, daughter of missing-scientist Alice, launches a search for her mother, who vanished from the hospital after being found unconscious on the grounds of a New Hampshire elephant refuge where a co-worker was fatally trampled. Jenna's father, Thomas, has been in a psychiatric hospital since the incident, and she lives with her grandmother, who refuses to discuss Alice’s fate. Jenna shares narrative duties with three others: Virgil, a police detective–turned–drunken private eye whose law enforcement career crashed and burned as a result of the botched investigation into the trampling death; Serenity, a clairvoyant, who was a national celebrity until her spirit guides deserted her in the middle of the search for a senator’s kidnapped child; and Alice herself, who details past events leading up to the pivotal crisis. As a young graduate student doing fieldwork at an African game preserve, Alice studied the grieving rituals of elephants, which include revering the bones of departed ancestors and burying deceased loved ones with leaves and grass. In Africa, Alice recognizes a kindred spirit in a visitor, Thomas, who runs a New Hampshire sanctuary for abused elephants rescued from circuses and zoos. She joins him there, marries him, gives birth to Jenna and begins to question her husband's sanity. Thus the seeds are sewn for a thriller that involves noble pachyderms, adultery and a breathless chase across several states. The pages turn apace, though Virgil labors under too many noir clichés, and wisecracking Serenity seems to be on loan from a Susan Isaacs novel.
The ending borrows unforgivably from a source it would be equally unforgivable to reveal.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-54492-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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