An outrageously weird yet delightfully charming wine-country tale that unravels into pure silliness by the end.
In this romp through the world of Napa Valley, a winery tour guide sets out to prove that his cousin faked his death—and not for the first time.
When Miles Trout, a driver for Napa Ramblers Winery Tours, learns that his best friend and cousin, Lucky Stephan Tarpitz, has suddenly died, he’s not very shocked. After all, this isn’t the first time Lucky has mysteriously perished; he previously faked his demise to escape the wrath of the elderly trailer park residents he targeted in an investment scam. When Miles finds out that Lucky’s body rolled out of the SUV speeding it to the hospital and disappeared without a trace, he is determined to uncover what really happened to his cousin. Along the way, he is waylaid by the various colorful characters who inhabit the close-knit Napa Valley wine community, including Emelina Hawkins, Lucky’s hotblooded evangelical stepsister, who is determined to revenge herself on Miles after he abandoned her at a taco restaurant on a date; Lexi Winterhaven, an elegant older woman who co-owned a racehorse named Love Blisters with Lucky; and Angelina DellaContorni, Lucky’s loose cannon of a mother, a former Las Vegas showgirl who holds “kinky wild all-night debaucheries at her modest Napa home where she lives with a tattooed woman witch named China Rose.” In his zany novel, Hewitt (One Shoe: When a Gold Rush is Not Enough, 2015, etc.) has created a hapless yet lovable loser protagonist in Miles, who despite his unfortunate life choices seems to be the sanest person in Napa—though that’s not saying much. Hewitt’s prose, littered with deliciously bizarre dialogue and other vivid details, makes his larger-than-life world feel fit for the big screen. These include his hilarious descriptions of the various wines that are the lifeblood of Napa, such as “Women’s Desires Vin Gris with a nose of tarragon, and hints of pickle relish and muscle balm,” and “Desperado Rosé wine with hints of hibiscus and saddle leather.” Unfortunately, when a subplot concerning alien visitors to Napa kicks in, the already insane story goes completely off the rails.
An outrageously weird yet delightfully charming wine-country tale that unravels into pure silliness by the end.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2016
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
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