by Julie Jacobsen Deck ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A sometimes-exhausting but realistic portrait of life under physical duress.
A young woman with chronic illness takes matters into her own hands in this debut novel.
Adrea “Drea” Ragnason can’t find a doctor who understands her. Her symptoms, from fatigue to baldness to acne to fainting spells, have come to define her. Her latest physician, Dr. Natsker, has the same dismissive bedside manner as other doctors Drea’s seen: one thinks she’s fainting because of stress from her final exams, while another believes that she just needs to exercise more. Luckily, her aunt, Betty, with whom she works at a bus station ticket booth, is sympathetic and compassionate, though Drea’s mother, Iris, is well-meaning but irritating. One morning Drea decides that the solution to her problems is to visualize her doctors as suffering from the same symptoms she has, and she does so in her journal. Meanwhile, Dr. Helene Gundersen, a talented psychologist, has just opened her own practice in a sunny, welcoming cottage; soon, some of her patients complain of terrible health issues. Betty helps Drea find an apartment above a flower shop owned by Otto, a widower who encourages her to continue to be more vocal with her doctors. When the opportunity comes for Drea to move into Otto’s house and help him open a plant nursery, she’s happy to do so. But she continues to have fainting spells and fatigue and demands to be tested for polycystic ovary syndrome. It’s revealed that some of Dr. Gundersen’s patients are also Drea’s doctors, and they come to realize that their lack of empathy for their patients is humiliating and frustrating when the tables are turned. Overall, this novel could have used more nuance, which might have elevated the novel from a litany of woes to a true exploration of empathy. It also takes a while for Dr. Gundersen’s role in the novel to become clear, and the epiphanies that her patients have are often heavy-handed. That said, the story does an excellent job of portraying the relentless difficulties of suffering from hard-to-treat, chronic illnesses. The characters that love Drea despite her issues are a welcome contrast to the self-pity that sometimes colors other chapters. Deck also considers Drea’s plight from several angles, including how it may be affected by gender bias. Although the novel ends abruptly, its message of self-advocacy and love is palpable.
A sometimes-exhausting but realistic portrait of life under physical duress.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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