In Burns’ (The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl, 2009) novel, a perpetual dieter decides, after her best friend dies, to follow through on “The Plan” they had made to go to Paris.
Recommendations for writing a can’t-put-down book: Make your protagonist funny, introspective or complicated—better yet, all three—as well as someone whom readers will immediately recognize and feel compassion for. That compassion has to hold up no matter how dubious the protagonist’s choices. For 29-year-old Amy Brodie, the decision to go to Paris is hardly questionable, but how she goes about it is. While her engineer husband is away on business, she sneaks away from their Phoenix home and boards a plane, intending to use cash she has stored away and to lie to her husband during daily phone calls. “Kat’s death, William’s wanting to start a family, the siren song of food—I traveled ten thousand miles…to get away from those things,” she says. Food, or the avoidance of it, controls every aspect of Amy’s life. She lives by a set of dieting rules. Rule No.11: “abstention is easier than moderation”; rule No.25: “feast your eyes first.” Of course, Paris isn’t exactly the best place to avoid carbs; neither is it a great place to avoid self-awareness. The Plan doesn’t go quite according to itself, and before long, Amy is trekking through Paris’ underground with a ragtag team of Frenchmen and sampling buttery croissants. Although Burns excels at the “rules” of good writing, her well-crafted novel is too moving to be formulaic. Amy’s struggle through her grief is touching, as is her feeling of being trapped. “Being demoted from independent working woman to dependent unemployed spouse can freak out a person” she says. “I want to get away from this life that has somehow become my life.” Her attempt to escape never stops being an absorbing adventure—not until the gratifying final moments, when we find out whether she succeeds.
A lovely ode to Paris, friendship, spontaneity and forks—both on the plate and in the road.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Velvet Morning Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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