by Lee Matthew Goldberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 2021
A colorful but somewhat unconvincing novel of impulse and delusion.
A woman with obsessive tendencies becomes the object of someone else’s obsession in Goldberg’s thriller.
Lexi Mazur is a pharmaceutical rep with a pill addiction and a fondness for vodka. She’s just been dumped by her boyfriend, Steve, who’d gotten wise to the fact that she’s been spying on him to make sure he hasn’t been cheating. Now she has little to do in her spare time other than sit around her Queens apartment with her cat, Sammi, and watch reality television shows. Her new favorite is Socialites, which follows a group of rich “frenemies” as they navigate New York City high society. She quickly becomes engrossed by the show’s star, Magnolia Artois, in whom Lexi sees some combination of role model and kindred spirit. She starts to stalk Magnolia on social media, commenting on all her posts, and then starts showing up in person at the show’s filming locations. Magnolia doesn’t react to Lexi’s fandom the way that Lexi wants her to, however, which forces the single-minded woman to escalate things a bit. Then something unexpected happens: Lexi attracts a stalker of her own. “I heard a rustling.…A shadow materialized, stalked away with a scraping sound against the dirt.” At first, Lexi is strangely turned on by it, but then the watcher becomes increasingly intrusive—and threatening, as when she receives a profanity-laden phone call from a restricted number: “I WILL GUT YOU….I’LL SCATTER YOUR BODY PARTS ALL OVER NEW YORK CITY.” But who could it be? Steve? Jeremy, the ex-boyfriend whom she alienated with her extreme behavior? Pria, her longtime best friend, whom Lexi suspects has a secret crush on her? Or is it Magnolia herself?
As Lexi continues in a pill-fueled haze, the lines between stalker and stalked, friend and frenemy, and reality and reality TV become increasingly blurred. Goldberg’s prose, as narrated by the protagonist, is snarky and slightly frenetic in tone: “I found solace when I got home in a pint of ice cream with broken up my blue heavens and a vodka chaser,” begins one chapter, referencing the blue pills that Lexi pops constantly. Another starts off, “Even though I wanted to head home and ooze into the couch watching reality TV, I needed to sell some drugs.” Parts of the novel are quite engrossing. The book is darkly comic, satirizing a number of contemporary institutions—big pharma, reality TV, social media celebrity—while pulling the reader into more transgressive territory involving sex, addiction, violence, and mental illness. However, the author seems to ultimately have very little to say about any of these topics. Also, almost nothing about the story feels terribly believable; its events are slightly too heightened, and Lexi’s thoughts seem slightly too well-organized considering her chaotic lifestyle. The subject matter is so serious on its face—and often in the story, which is not purely a comedy—that Lexi’s characterization feels gratuitous, akin to the shows she loves, which often seem to be messy-for-messy’s-sake.
A colorful but somewhat unconvincing novel of impulse and delusion.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Down & Out Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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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
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