by Kalan Chapman Lloyd ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
Charming and heartfelt, this complicated love story delivers a well-developed journey of self-discovery and romance.
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It’s raining men for a spunky lawyer-turned-detective in Volume 3 of the MisAdventures of Miss Lilly series.
Months after Lilly Katherine Atkins dusted off her boots and returned home to Brooks, Oklahoma, her cheating ex-fiance, Van Peyton Ehlers, is back in town and up to no good; her high school sweetheart, Cash Stetson, is out of rehab and working at her family’s ranch; and Spencer Locke, the former FBI agent who toils at her mentor’s law firm, won’t stop trying to rescue her. When cattle rustlers strike her family’s ranch, the three men in her life distract her as she tries to round up the culprits with the help of a gaggle of girlfriends. “I’m a terrible rancher’s daughter,” Lilly muses. “I love all the animals like pets. Yes, I eat meat…but it’s hard not to have” a certain fondness “for heifers that will follow you around like dogs.” The drawls are thick and the hair is high, but the characters in this installment are more introspective than cartoonish. Confronted with so many men at once, Lilly has an identity crisis, and many bad hair days and wardrobe choices ensue. Her soul-searching takes on a lightly religious tone—more so than in the previous books by Lloyd (Mo(u)rning Joy, 2015, etc.)—as she turns to her Christian faith for solace. Her family and friends, notably Fae Lynn, who’s now pregnant, also provide the type of homespun wisdom that makes small-town stories so appealing. Long talks over homemade cookies or store-bought cakes that will “do in a pinch” add vivid sensory details, as do the quiet moments when Lilly’s Poppa gives her a reassuring pat on the hand. Meanwhile, a rumored sex tape raises the stakes for Lilly to get Van out of her life for good. Aside from her overuse of the word “allegedly,” the straight-shooting heroine is a good foil for the smarmy lawyer. Cash, who had a certain appeal in the previous novels, now seems like a bad habit that Lilly needs to kick. And Spencer’s levelheaded approach to Lilly’s nonstop drama really starts to work for him. Although Lilly’s sleuthing takes a back seat to her many failed relationships, the final showdown with the cattle rustlers adds excitement to an otherwise emotion-heavy plot.
Charming and heartfelt, this complicated love story delivers a well-developed journey of self-discovery and romance.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 203
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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