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Cancer Faith & Butterflies

Name: Cancer Faith & Butterflies
Author: Johnny M. Sanchez

HOW DO YOU BELIEVE WHEN YOUR WORLD FALLS APART?

by Johnny M. Sanchez ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A promising tale with quirky characters and fresh insights, marred by a predictable deus ex machina.

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A young father faces Joblike trials in this debut Christian novel.

Joey lost both parents in a tragic accident. Now he faces losing the love of his life, Brooke, to breast cancer. Shuffling between the hospital, his home, and work, he reminisces about happier times and wonders how Brooke can maintain her faith in God. His doubt is echoed by Jim Anderson, whose preteen son Jimmy fights cancer in the hospital room next door. Jimmy and Brooke die on the same day, and Joey is left to raise his 8-month-old daughter, Sara, with the help of his sister, Carroll. Like Brooke, Carroll is a Christian. Before Brooke’s funeral, Joey yells at God and accidentally rousts a homeless man, Billy Jones, squatting on the church steps. Billy reveals that Brooke had been kind to him, giving him food and attending services with him over the objections of congregants. Billy also exhorts Joey to find strength in his faith, but the protagonist feels that everywhere he turns he encounters Christians but never God or any real answers. When a lump is discovered below his daughter’s left shoulder, Joey becomes frightened: Brooke had been diagnosed with cancer while pregnant with Sara. A biopsy reveals a malignant tumor, and Joey lashes out at those he loves and recklessly confronts an enemy. Sanchez develops his characters through humorous, astute dialogue and situations, and his writing shines when describing Joey’s and Brooke’s first meeting and Joey’s mentor-friendship with Jimmy. At one point, Joey takes the boy for a ride in his red Chevy (“He looked free as a bird just sitting there with his eyes closed and a smile on his face. It was like all the months in the hospital, the chemo, the pain, had all just melted away…No words were spoken, just the wind in our hair and the hum of the engine”). Joey’s agony over Brooke’s death and his questions about God in the face of it are handled deftly and delicately, but later, the novel spirals into melodrama and propaganda. A convenient set of “coincidences” finally convinces Joey of God’s existence, but his earlier questions remain unanswered. Furthermore, a key scene, in which the police release Joey after only a brief interrogation when he assaults a man, and a natural event that “scientists can’t explain” lack credibility.

A promising tale with quirky characters and fresh insights, marred by a predictable deus ex machina.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.