Lovers of Nunn’s previous novels may discover in Chance a less than creditable antihero.
Nunn, who forged his fiction-writing career by concentrating on surfers and their sport (Tijuana Straits, 2004, etc.), changes gears in this gritty portrait of a neuropsychologist named Chance.
Eldon Chance sees broken people in his job, so it’s almost inevitable that some of those individuals would bleed over into his personal life. Or what’s left of his personal life. Now that his wife, Carla, is divorcing him, and his daughter, Nicole, is growing more and more distant, Chance is starting to feel the loneliness and disengagement of losing his home life. With everything in flux and under pressure from the IRS to pay back taxes in connection with Carla’s business, Chance uncharacteristically jumps into a situation with a woman who is both mesmerizing and dangerous. Jaclyn Blackstone was a referral that Chance should have kept at a professional distance, but instead, the beautiful, fractured woman evolves into something more significant. After Chance becomes enmeshed in her life, his own becomes complicated: Jaclyn suffers from a dual personality disorder that causes her to transform into the sexually obsessed Jackie, but both of Jaclyn’s incarnations are unhappily married to a vicious, abusive police officer who makes it clear to Chance that his involvement with Jaclyn/Jackie will cost him everything he holds dear. But Chance has a bizarre ace up his sleeve in the form of his odd relationship with a man named D, a giant wall of a human being who appears not to be afraid of anyone or anything. Eventually, Nunn’s characters cross paths, and Chance’s decisions cause his life to careen from slightly off balance to out of control. Nunn, a writer with a gift for subtlety and wordplay, spins a story that is both mesmerizing and a bit confusing. Readers will find Nunn’s story well-written for the most part but not always engaging.
Lovers of Nunn’s previous novels may discover in Chance a less than creditable antihero.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8924-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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