A novel of stark beauty and even starker consequence whose language makes up for the often opaque action of the plot.
An heiress to the ancient money of a storied family seeks revenge for personal and global wrongs in this powerful debut novel.
Hannah is the precociously brilliant daughter of the Syrl family. Her rootlet of the family tree—which traces its origins back to Nordic conquest—is led by the somewhat scantily sketched figure of her renegade father, a lesser son who has rejected the lineage of rapacious, colonialist greed that has resulted in his family’s stratospheric wealth. Raised under the haphazard supervision of parents embroiled in the dissolutions of their respective marriages, Hannah and her unnamed male best friend (who narrates the book) are largely educated by the Old One and the Wise One. These are two aging grandparents who provide the children with access to the myth structures of the native peoples who once walked the woods that surround them, teach them how to raise wolf pups, train them in Latin, Greek, and Potawatomi (an Algonquin language), and embed within them a deep appreciation for the value of brutality and the civilizations which are born from it. As a teenager, Hannah is brought back into the fold of the Syrl family by the aging matriarch of the clan (sister to the Wise One). When she opposes a scheme presented by the ruthless eldest son of the Syrl tribe, she is punished with a brutal violation of both her body and her trust. This act sets her on a path of epic vengeance—aided and abetted by our impassioned narrator (who is now both friend and lover); Annika, a sexually nihilistic cousin; Justin, a friend with a gift for violence; and a cast of other druggies, skaters, dealers, and hackers who help her take her vengeance to a global scale. The impact of the novel’s plot is somewhat hampered by its mode of telling. Our narrator is doubly removed from the action by both time (the events of the book have all happened in the past) and emotional distance (he loves Hannah but he is not Hannah, who is the undisputed main character of the novel). In spite of this, de la Durantaye’s (Beckett’s Art of Mismaking, 2016, etc.) background as a literary critic and scholar is translated here into a facility with the mutable power of myth that renders his prose at once a dream and a brutal awakening.
A novel of stark beauty and even starker consequence whose language makes up for the often opaque action of the plot.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-944211-50-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
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