by Karl Dehmelt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2016
Strong prose, but this novel’s chief conceit falters.
A writer’s friendship with a mentally ill man sustains him through a painful crisis in this novel.
After a hard childhood marked by poverty, hard work, and his parents’ beatings, Stephen Christiansen, 28, has become a man of good fortune. Although he’s not yet 30, he’s already published three well-reviewed novels and works as an editor at Baltimore’s Bessemer Press, owned by his old friend Charlie Shultz. Stephen lives with Phoebe Walker, a nurse, to whom he’s been deeply devoted since he proposed marriage to her seven years ago. She never seems quite ready for a wedding, but she assures him that someday she will be. Nevertheless, Stephen keeps having disturbing, recurring nightmares about a woman on a grassy knoll who keeps fading away from him. One day, Stephen interrupts a street robbery, saves a man’s life, and gets shot himself. He becomes friends with the intended victim, Isaac Sellers, even though they’re very different; Stephen is white and affluent while Isaac describes himself as a “black, fiscally disenfranchised, schizophrenic—mentally ill—man living in America today.” Isaac is a fan of Stephen’s work and an aspiring writer, although he’s troubled by voices that order him to kill himself or his wife. Medication helps calm his symptoms but also makes Isaac, in his own words, “a drudge.” The two men begin a friendship that becomes invaluable to Stephen when his life turns upside-down. Isaac, despite his own struggles, continues to inspire Stephen as a writer and as a man. Dehmelt (The Hard Way Back to Heaven, 2015) displays a wonderful ear for dialogue in this novel, nicely capturing the easy banter between old friends or longtime lovers. He can turn a good phrase, too, as when the radiance drains from a woman’s face “as if she’s waking up the morning after a funeral.” Phoebe’s chief conflict—she can’t live up to Stephen’s fictionalized version of her, because no one could—serves the story and characters well. However, Isaac, despite his importance to the plot, is a weak creation; he sounds exactly like Stephen, possessing no original voice, and he’s also another example of the “magical minority” cliché—an outsider character of color whose sole function is to aid a white protagonist.
Strong prose, but this novel’s chief conceit falters.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 193
Publisher: Apprentice House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Robinne Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2017
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.
When Solène Marchand takes her 12-year-old daughter to a concert by the hottest boy band on the planet, she doesn't expect to fall in love with one of the singers.
Middle-aged art gallery owner Solène hasn’t dated since her divorce, but when her ex-husband buys their daughter and a group of her friends tickets to Vegas and a backstage concert experience, then backs out at the last minute, she steps in as escort. The five guys in the wildly popular English boy band August Moon appeal to women of all ages, but Hayes, the brains behind the group’s success, flirts with Solène at the concert meet and greet, invites them to a party after the show, then pursues her once she gets back to Los Angeles. He’s only 20 and he’s incredibly famous; his attention is flattering and heady. The two fall into an affair that’s supposed to be light and easy, but before long they can’t ignore their intense emotional attachment. Solène is hesitant to tell her daughter, but when she procrastinates, Isabelle learns about it through an online tabloid, which damages their relationship and leaves Solène open to censure from her ex. Then, once the affair goes viral, she experiences the darker side of Hayes’ fan base. What started out as a jaunty adventure turns into an emotionally fraught journey, and Solène must decide what she’s willing to risk for her happiness and what she won’t risk for her daughter’s. Actress Lee, who appeared in Fifty Shades Darker, debuts with a beautifully written novel that explores sex, love, romance, and fantasy in moving, insightful ways while also examining a woman’s struggle with aging and sexism, with a nod at the tension between celebrity and privacy.
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12590-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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