A gloomy, character-driven story with a potency that’s not easy to match.
A woman questions her sanity when she begins interacting with ghosts in Abbott’s debut thriller.
One night, 44-year-old wife and mother Phoebe Rivers is out for a late run when two strangers accost and rape her. She manages to stab one of her assailants before a third man, Petrel, rescues her. She later learns that Petrel may be the ghost of a man who died approximately 70 years ago. She’s reluctant to tell the cops or her husband, David, about the rape, for fear that they’ll think her insane; besides, she thinks she may have killed one of the rapists. She goes on to see more dead people, such as Sorel, a runaway slave from the Civil War era—but that fact is far less disturbing than what Phoebe learns about David. It turns out that he has another life, including a girlfriend named Annette. The adulterous couple may be up to something unspeakably sinister—something that may put Phoebe and her children in danger. Abbott pulls no punches in her somber tale, and she draws readers into some very bleak territory. A number of scary scenes may make readers cringe, as they involve young children. The violence, however, is never left unchecked; instead, Abbott merely highlights details of grisly sequences and lets readers’ imaginations carry the rest. Whether Phoebe is truly witnessing spirits or dreaming them is initially ambiguous, but the story makes it abundantly clear what’s happening before it’s over. In any case, the ghosts aren’t as riveting as the living characters. Annette, for instance, proves the vilest and most reprehensible character of all; the chapters focusing on her perspective reveal a back story that readers may find impossible to forget. The narrative’s timeline, however, is a little hard to follow, and the ages of Phoebe’s children are inconsistent. The kids’ long-suffering mother, though, is indefatigable. Indeed, Phoebe faces every tribulation head-on—an admirable trait in a protagonist.
A gloomy, character-driven story with a potency that’s not easy to match.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1612964881
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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