A reasoned, pensive, and sometimes-tragic tale that yearns for tolerance.
A Philadelphia lawyer struggling with his sexuality and relationships befriends a mailroom clerk in this novel.
On the surface, Charles Hamilton appears to lead a fairly comfortable life with a bright future. After graduating from law school in the late 1970s, he easily secures a job in asset management at a brokerage house and is living with a British-born woman 10 years his senior named Carol Melbourne. Charles is young and attractive but has some mannerisms that lead many people to wonder if he is gay. Even Carol’s mother, the prim Edith Larue, laments: “What chance did Carol have? Some of these homosexuals can actually hypnotize a woman.” As the story jumps back and forth between the ’70s and the ’90s, Charles’ struggles are shown to be quite complex as more and more layers are revealed. He regularly visits a psychiatrist to work out his feelings about his sexuality and his partners, including those that result from Carol’s addiction to pills. Interspersed are scenes with Jimmy Zelroué, a gay, deaf mailroom clerk at the brokerage, whom Charles is intrigued by. They live in a decidedly anti-gay world where snap judgments and bigoted insults are the norm and the old-school ways of Philadelphia’s hardscrabble neighborhoods present an almost inescapable hazard. As the nation reels from the fallout of the savings and loan crisis, Charles turns to a hacker named Shirley Azalea to help him rescue someone he cares for. Nicholas (Black Mamba, 2016) has a superb ear for dialogue, easily writing about a time period when homophobic suspicion was loudly broadcast, whether in the financial world, academia, or working-class havens. While Charles is looking to connect, others whine and judge, terrified of a perceived homosexual threat. The novel’s many characters and their backstories are carefully portrayed, including several dynamic female characters, such as hacking pioneer Shirley. The author describes her operation’s technicalities as skillfully as he depicts the legal and financial issues that arise in the narrative. But the digressive structure of the book can make it unclear what year it is, and some extraneous characters and minor plot points play too big of a role.
A reasoned, pensive, and sometimes-tragic tale that yearns for tolerance.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Copperthwaite
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2018
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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