A sprawling, ambitious novel overshadowed by unnecessary, awkward digressions.
In Allis’ debut novel, one woman’s journey out of an abusive marriage begins when the Twin Towers fall.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Kathy Stockton is in her Upper East Side home preparing to meet Jessica, her brother’s widow, for the first time; her brother died in a freak accident days earlier. She gets a phone call telling her that Jessica is in the hospital after hitting her head while trying to prevent a woman from being hit by a car. Kathy races to the hospital and learns that the woman she thinks is Jessica has injuries unrelated to her fall, “consistent with…repeated beatings.” Kathy takes the amnesiac woman back to her luxurious brownstone to recover, and the woman realizes that her name is actually Anissa Brogdon. She saved Jessica from getting run over, and paramedics thought Jessica’s identification was hers; Anissa’s abusive husband, Tennessee plastic surgeon Foley Brogdon, had taken her own wallet, purse and even her shoes to ensure she would remain in their hotel room near the Twin Towers while he attended a conference. Despite his abuse, Anissa immediately demands to call him—until Kathy shares that she too was a victim of violence from her own, now-deceased husband. Kathy realizes that the events of 9/11 have given Anissa an opportunity to recreate her life. She whisks Anissa away to Georgia, where she helps her start anew, but will she ever be able to escape Foley? Allis’ novel is extremely ambitious, taking on 9/11 and including a wide range of characters. At its best, it’s a suspenseful story about women helping other women to survive domestic violence. Unfortunately, the quality of the prose doesn’t match its ambition. There are graphic, clichéd sex scenes (“the dance that men and women have danced together to the beat of the erotic musical tempo of their bodies thrashing down through the ages”), and the plot relies heavily on convenient coincidences. For example, Anissa had Jessica’s purse at the accident scene because she’d grabbed it to yank Jessica out of traffic—but wouldn’t Jessica have been carrying some kind of photo ID? The novel also repeatedly diverges from the plot to describe the geopolitical reverberations of the terrorist attacks, and every time a character enters a new house, there’s a distracting, detailed description of home furnishings that wouldn’t be out of place in Elle Décor.
A sprawling, ambitious novel overshadowed by unnecessary, awkward digressions.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 352
Publisher: T.S.W. Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2014
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
