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A Quiet Resignation

Name: A Quiet Resignation
Author: Kevin Mc

by Kevin Mc ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2012

Despite occasional moments of eloquence, the story—burdened by incensed, rambling speeches and half-realized...

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Still harboring bitter rage at a bully from his school years, a university professor concocts an elaborate, violent plan to ruin his nemesis’ life.

Charlie Springbank tormented many people during his youth. A popular football player, he beat up many other boys and disgraced several of the girls. However, as the story’s unnamed narrator notes with glee, Charlie’s success diminished after graduation, thanks to a failed football career at Boston College and an unhappy marriage to the Boston police chief’s daughter. The narrator, meanwhile, found success and some happiness in his own marriage and career as a university professor. But, in a most unpleasant way, he’s pushed over the edge after witnessing Charlie urinate through an open window of his beloved sports car. In a series of passionate monologues interrupted only by brief dialogues, he slowly unveils a murderous scheme to destroy Charlie—and take out some of the city’s more unseemly characters—through a plan he dubs “The Masterwork.” Initially, the book calls to mind the amusing, endearing self-aggrandizement of Frederick Exley’s A Fan's Notes. Unfortunately, it morphs into a series of manifestos that mix clever, vivid turns of phrase with furious, often bizarre rants about people the narrator doesn’t like: Charlie, President Obama and “ivory tower” professors, to name just a few. The story borders on satire, with the narrator waxing poetically about everyone else’s flaws as the body count grows. Yet the more he verbally skewers Charlie and the other targets of his anger, the more the story falls victim to telling rather than showing. The author possesses a mouth-watering flair for describing food and beer, but that talent doesn’t extend to locations (Boston settings are listed without much identification beyond street names) or characters (with the exception of Charlie, they fill caricatured roles and hold vapid, stilted dialogues). While the story starts out intriguingly, the narrator’s raging displeasure and smarmy self-congratulatory attitude ultimately hold it hostage, leaving behind a tale that loves its own voice a little too much.

Despite occasional moments of eloquence, the story—burdened by incensed, rambling speeches and half-realized characters—falls short.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2012

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 205

Publisher: Evergreen Umbrella

Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2020

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.