A well-crafted university story that speaks to the human spirit.
In this novel, a veteran teacher faces ethical boundaries as she invests in the academic and personal lives of her students.
Jane Frost has been teaching in the English as a Second Language program at McBee University in Iowa for more than 20 years. This tale primarily examines the triumphs and struggles of the international students enrolled in Jane’s ESL Low Intermediate Grammar/Writing class. Jane goes above and beyond to teach her students the intricacies of English so they can pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language exam in order to move on and enroll in American universities. She encourages her students of varying ages and cultural backgrounds to come together and find rapport. In particular, Jane takes an interest in her two Japanese students for very different reasons: Chika Yamamoto, an uninterested young woman with flunking grades, and 60-something Yumi Murata, an affable, hardworking woman and stellar student with some secrets of her own. When the usually gleeful Yumi begins withdrawing and her grades start to slip, Jane tussles with getting involved; in the past, she has been chastised by Kaye Bibber, the program director, for her liberal boundaries when it comes to the affairs of her students. Additionally, Jane is challenged by her new mentee, first-year teacher Donna Bittner, whose provocative clothing and odd, lackadaisical teaching style rattle McBee’s ESL department. In this finely constructed novel, Kasten (Wildwood, 2013, etc.) deftly focuses on Jane’s lessons, including teachings and conversations in class about dialogue, diction, grammar, and idioms of American vernacular. But the “twist” at the end of the tale is abrupt; a more thorough explanation would have been helpful. Jane is a strong character but she would have benefited from a more in-depth back story. Although there are a few anecdotes about her childhood memories and brief mentions of siblings, Jane also fleetingly alludes to her raucous time in the 1960s and her early adulthood “living communally and holding up hostile signs in front of certain corporate headquarters and military installations.” Fully explored, this would have added a nice layer to the narrative.
A well-crafted university story that speaks to the human spirit.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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