An uneven but emotional and thoughtful look at a girl facing big questions.
A seriously ill girl gets philosophical guidance from an imaginary friend in this novel.
Lily Fiore, 12, has been very sick with a blood cancer for three years. Her parents moved the family from a place called Reverie to Salvation, New York, a town built up around a famous children’s hospital; there, Lily receives grueling transfusions and other treatments. As if serious illness wasn’t bad enough, Lily is isolated to avoid contact with people and their germs. Her worried parents try to stay positive and look for signs that prove that their daughter will recover. Throughout the novel, Lily—a thoughtful girl—considers big questions, such as whether life is random, the nature of eternity, and the lessons of her beloved, late grandfather Tony Agnello, who taught her to pray when she was 6: “Always start and end the day being grateful, thanking God, the Universe, the Great Spirit or whatever you want to believe is the ultimate truth.” Lily’s imaginary friend, the kindhearted Bebette, began appearing to Lily in her dreams and waking thoughts after she became ill. They play together and chat, often in “Hide-Land,” a magical kingdom where Lily could fly—until about a year ago, after the family moved. In a long conversation, Bebette explains Hide-Land, what it means to be a “Seeker,” the importance of dreams, and the advisability of having a philosophy of life. As new developments loom—a medication, a friend—Lily goes on a dream journey that helps prepare her for what’s next. Barone (The Clown Don, 2017, etc.) treads on dangerous ground by using the heart-wrenching image of a very sick young girl to win readers’ support. The opening pages do play on their sympathies, as when Lily dreams of children playing ring-around-the-rosie who then turn into horrifying skeletons and ashes. But to Barone’s credit, he doesn’t melodramatically dwell on Lily’s pain, fear, or potential death; instead, he usually addresses such concerns more subtly, as with images of flight. Lily’s father, for example, becomes obsessed with building her a helicopter (or buying a $100,000 do-it-yourself kit) so that she may fly in reality, if not in her dreams. For Lily’s mother, safety is the chief concern, and it’s shown how unfair it is for Lily’s father to make her a villain: “Why do you always make impossible suggestions that I am forced to reject?” she says. Lily, who overhears their argument, is shown to have the insight that what needs fixing is her broken imagination: “She didn’t need a helicopter. She needed to fly without one.” Similarly, Barone shows Lily’s fiercely spirited defense of Bebette and Hide-Land against her mother’s disapproval: “What else do I HAVE right now?” she screams. The book’s proper audience is hard to figure out, though; it’s written from a 12-year-old’s perspective, but Lily is wise beyond her years, and not many tweens will be intrigued by the book’s lengthier, more abstract philosophical discussions.
An uneven but emotional and thoughtful look at a girl facing big questions.Pub Date: May 18, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 144
Publisher: All Small Tales
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2017
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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