A thoughtful fantasy about the lies that we tell ourselves about our identities and our choices.
A recently deceased woman reflects on her life and comes to some surprising conclusions in Morehead’s (The Best From the Cheap Seats, 2014, etc.) novel.
Joanna “Jo” Lynn Anderson Campbell is dead. To her chagrin, the widow and mother of two didn’t go straight to heaven. Instead, she’s stuck in a kind of limbo with only one other entity for company—her very chatty, sometimes-bossy Soul. At first, the self-righteous Jo is upset she hasn’t been granted immediate entry into the afterlife despite having lived a good life on Earth: “My anger seems to be focused on the faith that sustained me in life. Was all that for nothing?” she wonders in the first panicked moments after her demise. But Soul aims to show the reluctant Joanna that her life as the “perfect daughter, wife, mother, grandmother” wasn’t so perfect after all. Indeed, at first, Jo’s existence seemed blessedly humdrum—almost unbelievably so. She grew up with two loving parents in the small, Norman Rockwell–esque town of Chestertown, Maryland, in the late 1950s, married young, and had two children. But Morehead gradually and effectively complicates the narrative as Soul urges Jo to look back on her childhood, her youthful friendships, her romance with her husband, and her marriage. Slowly, Soul—who’s sometimes an impatient teacher—gets Jo to understand that her belief in her perfect life was a fantasy that allowed her to avoid difficult emotions. Occasionally, Soul gives Jo a glimpse at what others around her were doing in the past, but more often, Soul pushes Jo to confront her own uncomfortable memories. This philosophical novel starts out rather slowly, and some of its readers may find that Jo’s prickly attitude, combined with her rose-colored view of the past, will require some patience to get through. But eventually it becomes clear that this unsympathetic characterization is all part of the author’s plan. By the end of the novel, she ably shows how Soul gradually allows Jo to come to the conclusion that “Human beings are MEANT to be imperfect.”
A thoughtful fantasy about the lies that we tell ourselves about our identities and our choices.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Churchill Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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