An effective modern-day romance about two people brought together by the tragedy of a child's illness.
A contemporary novel focuses on a tenderhearted football star who helps out an emotionally wounded single mother.
The latest from the sister-writing team Daughters (The Snows, 2014) opens with the lives of its two main characters jerking wildly off-course. Nikki Lambert's husband, John, has suddenly died when his truck was struck at a railroad crossing. Nikki is certain the collision was no accident—she’s sure her husband killed himself rather than face the future in the wake of their son Jack’s diagnosis with a rare condition called adrenoleukodystrophy or ALD, which will quickly begin to impair the boy’s mobility. Though numb with shock and grief, Nikki is determined to give Jack as much of a normal life as she can, and a big part of that revolves around the Good Sports Club, an activity center where he can play sports with kids his own age. But when his ALD begins to manifest itself and he starts tripping and slipping during games, the center’s coach requests that he stay at home. Nikki is outraged, and so is the Good Sports’ owner, longtime NFL star Ramsey Delaney, whose starring berth with the New England Dragons has recently been abruptly terminated, supposedly due to his slow recovery from an injury. Once the conflict over Jack brings Ram and Nikki together, the novel settles into the standard contemporary-romance template as a slow, reluctant relationship begins to develop between the two characters. But Daughters invests the story with a great deal of emotional resonance. Ram’s inner tenderness and wry humor feel entirely in keeping with his forceful personality, and Nikki—an ordinary woman suddenly confronted with an extraordinary demand on her adaptability and emotions—is a vivid fictional creation. And young Jack himself develops into the book’s most memorable character (in one scene, Ram asks him if he’d like to play football when he grows up and he calmly replies, “I'm not going to grow up”). The book’s well-orchestrated ending sections shouldn’t leave a dry eye in the house.
An effective modern-day romance about two people brought together by the tragedy of a child's illness.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 268
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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