A bit shallow but always enjoyable.
Three girlfriends across the pond navigate the roller coaster of sex, love and life in this entertaining chick-lit debut.
If Sex and the City had taken place in London with a trio of spirited black women, it might look something like the adventures of Coco, Chama and Tasha. Three friends from university, they meet for weekly gossip sessions at their favorite bistro, but lately there has been trouble in girlfriend paradise. Chama, now a deeply religious, doting wife, harshly judges her friends. Tasha has devoted herself to a spiritual path of meditation, yoga and her spirit guide, Pam, becoming a whimsical hippie in the process, much to Chama’s and Coco’s chagrin. And Coco, the Louboutin-wearing, Beamer-driving editor of Chocolate magazine, may have ruined her marriage when she was caught hooking up with an old flame. While Coco gets cut off from her wealth, Chama struggles to get her husband sexually interested in her again, and Tasha realizes that her boyfriend, Kerin, is cheating on her. Instead of leaning on each other for help, the women dig themselves into a deeper mess. In order to survive each of the problems they’ve found, Coco, Chama and Tasha discover that they have to drop the attitudes, speak the truth, and show up for one another. It may take a lot of confessions, a few tropical drinks and one late-night heist, but nothing will stop these women from ending up on top. Told in alternating chapters from three points of view with more interior monologue than storytelling, the novel bounces along, delighting in the conversational tone of each woman’s personality. Their voices have built-in asides, breaking the text every few paragraphs, whether it’s Tasha’s meditation chants, Chama’s religious Scriptures or Coco’s sarcastic rebuttals. The asides can be a bit distracting from the plot that’s trying to unfold, yet every chapter works hard to end on a note of suspense. Since the women are drawn as such extreme characters, there’s an air of disbelief that they’d all be such good friends, but the novel rolls forward with a good sense of humor, lots of sex talk and a fair amount of fashion. While it’s not the most original plot, it’s refreshing to see women of color at the forefront of a fun chick-lit novel.
A bit shallow but always enjoyable.Pub Date: March 31, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
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
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
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