A psychologically authentic quest into a complex history of love and grief.
In Edwards’ novel, a single, grieving mother discovers shocking secrets about her family and herself.
Nearly two years ago, Southern Californian Talia Brighton’s firefighter husband, Russ, died while battling a wildfire. She seeks help from a therapist after realizing she’s prone to walking—and, apparently, trail-running—in her sleep, leaving her 5-year-old daughter, Riley, alone in the house (“Oh God, it is happening again, she’d thought”). Her first meeting with Dr. Cohn, who reminds her of a Catholic nun from her youth, sends her mind spinning; from there, the novel travels across space and time but retains its consistent pacing and patience, pitched somewhere between a mystery and a thriller. As Talia takes her first steps to moving on with her life, she revisits, through a series of incisive flashbacks, her childhood in Australia. There, she and her older sister, Naomi, were orphaned under mysterious circumstances and taken to an orphanage by their Aunt Miriam; she returns five years later to pick up the girls, eventually taking them to Seattle to meet their paternal grandparents. Readers grow used to the book’s constant shimmering between past and present, although in one chapter Talia loops into so many flashbacks—while driving to the opera with her sister, while walking from their parking spot to the theater, and while watching the dancers in the first act—that it becomes frustrating, and the present-day story starts to feel insubstantial. Along the way, Talia recalls many things about her past, which whirls around her like the smoke and flames that claimed her husband. Overall, Edwards’ narrative asks intriguing questions: Must family history repeat itself? How does one judge others from past generations? The slow revelation of Talia’s family history is engaging enough to draw readers in and maintain their interest; the past never quite overwhelms the present, although it does obscure the future. At the end, readers take leave of Talia with several questions unanswered, but the fact that the smoke never fully clears may be the point.
A psychologically authentic quest into a complex history of love and grief.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781647047283
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Sugar Pine Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2024
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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