An intriguing but meandering volcano tale with little to balance its bleak worldview.
In this debut literary novel, a young family begins a wildfire-inspired road trip across the Beehive State.
Seasonal wildfires continue to decimate the Western United States, and the town of Logan, Utah, is in danger of being consumed. Young married couple Lee and Becca Smith are about to hit the road—not a moment too soon. Lee has his mind on the Yellowstone supervolcano, which is apparently getting quite fidgety, while Becca doesn’t know if she can stand any more time alone with their infant daughter, Analise: “The two of them walked outside and Lee locked the front door of their tiny duplex behind them, Becca sarcastically thinking that the imminent destruction of the planet via a volcano or earthquake or wildfire seemed more pleasant to her than marriage or motherhood.” As they make their unhurried way across the state of Utah to a family wedding at Zion National Park, the couple fret about the parenthood that forced them into marriage and the many untaken roads in their separate lives. Along the way, they encounter a gaggle of friends, relatives, and strangers, including both Lee’s and Becca’s mothers and an unhinged veteran–turned–domestic terrorist. Rogers’ plainspoken prose deftly depicts ordinary life interspersed with images of personal and societal doom. Lee’s dreams feature “images of the bubbling caldera under Yellowstone,” its yellow and red lava “hissing, creeping, slowly making its way to the surface of the earth. The wolves and mountain lions and grizzly bears all fleeing from the impending disaster in the area in their mammalian omniscience.” The story is a bit too long and a bit too slow, with the human drama taking a back seat to the ominous climatic and volcanic imagery and literally apocalyptic conclusion. (Readers learn, in the introduction, that this volume is meant to be read as a manuscript found beneath the rubble of the former state of Utah.) While the title, premise, and Tolkien-inspired state map at the book’s beginning all suggest a work of levity—or at least satire—the actual novel is a largely dreary tale of people enacting the Freudian death drive. As pressures build in their own lives, so too do the pressures beneath the ailing Earth’s crust.
An intriguing but meandering volcano tale with little to balance its bleak worldview.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63752-975-1
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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