A mostly solid historical novel hampered by its simplistic approach to midcentury Southern racism.
In this debut historical novel, a young white girl crosses social boundaries in South Carolina in 1947.
Thirteen-year-old Chloe Mason is part of an old Southern family that was once wealthy before the Civil War but is now struggling to get by. She sometimes follows her brother Caleb on hunting expeditions in the swamp, and at other times, she loses herself in books; both activities serve as distractions from her heavy-drinking father’s harsh behavior. She eventually befriends Big Jim, the reputedly “feebleminded” adult son of her neighbor’s black housekeeper, and she teaches him to read. Chloe knows that she has to keep the reading lessons secret from her racist father and neighbors; however, she later discovers a family connection between herself and Big Jim that defies the rules of her community. Belmont is clearly knowledgeable about her setting, and her strong prose vividly describes the rural atmosphere, with references to ceaseless humidity, veneration of Confederate-era ancestors, and local folk songs. She depicts the violent hatred that fills Chloe’s world with equal clarity; characters frequently use racial epithets and even threaten lynchings. However, the racism is presented primarily through the eyes of the white characters (“He don’t mean nothing by it,” Chloe says to Big Jim after her father whips him, “it’s just the way he was brought up”). Even though Chloe is young, it’s frustrating that she’s so slow to grasp that Big Jim is in far more danger than she is (“When it came right down to it, I was more entrapped than he was”). The story also leans on the white-savior trope (“That’s all I wanted. To free Big Jim”), and the childlike and “fragile” Big Jim, with his “certain purity” and willingness to follow Chloe’s lead, never becomes a fully realized character. That said, the novel’s resolution is largely satisfying.
A mostly solid historical novel hampered by its simplistic approach to midcentury Southern racism.Pub Date: July 31, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 321
Publisher: King's House Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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