Chaim Potok meets Leon Uris: a solid if overlong portrait of violence and renewal.
Sophomore novel from South African writer Bonert (The Lion Seeker, 2013) exploring the turbulent closing years of the apartheid regime.
Martin Helger is a teenage mess. As one of the band of neighborhood kids who torments him says, “You don’t have any friends. You can’t do sports.…You don’t have really much personality, hey, I mean admit.” He’s different, a working-class Jew in a world of segregation and separation, and he’ll certainly never measure up to his brother, Marcus, who’s graduated from high school and has disappeared somewhere in the front lines of war, missing in action and likely dead. A spot of hope comes into his life in the form of an American whirlwind, “a serious beauty” named Annie Goldberg, who’s come to live with the Helgers while teaching African children in a township school. Annie smolders at the injustice of apartheid, and Martin falls under her spell even as the state security forces begin to clamp down on the anti-apartheid movement. It doesn’t take long before the violence begins to mount, and then, one by one, Martin’s friends and family begin to leave the stage, with only a very bad Afrikaaner cop to suggest a way out. Until, that is, Marcus returns; as it turns out, he has been an elite fighter all along and is now tangled up in a scheme meant to destroy the anti-apartheid cause once and for all. “Violence works,” he says. “S’why they cane you from the start.” Drawing on real events in recent South African history, Bonert unfolds a sometimes-crawling plot that threatens now and again to veer into Frederick Forsyth territory, though it’s embedded in an eminently literary character study that explores a Jewish community whose elders are deeply reluctant to take part in the struggle—“Our job as Jews is to take care of Jews!” shouts Martin’s father—but who, as always and everywhere, are swept up in the chaos.
Chaim Potok meets Leon Uris: a solid if overlong portrait of violence and renewal.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-88618-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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