History, science, and heart make for a read that’s both cozy and complex.
A debut environmental novel explores struggles both past and distressingly present.
Jess Jensen and Piah have a lot in common. They’ve both grown up on the banks of the Nesika River and lost younger sisters to its current. Nevertheless, as they press on into adulthood—Piah into motherhood and Jess into a career in field biology—they continue to feel a connection to the river. And when it’s threatened, they find a link between them in dreams and visions despite their insurmountable differences—Piah lived 200 years before Jess, a Molalla tribeswoman rather than a modern Oregonian. As Piah tries to interpret her premonitions of disaster and the reality of sickness besetting her village, Jess fights to get a dam removed from the river, knowing that the structure’s effect on the ecosystem will be disastrous but unable to get anyone to listen. Jess finds herself with fewer and fewer allies, as her boyfriend, Jeff, works for the power company and seems more committed to compromise than to what’s best for the ecology, and her friend Suzie abuses her trust with radical environmentalists. As time passes for Jess and Piah, their battles continue to rage, taking a horrific toll. It’s only when they bond and seek out the lessons they have to teach each other that peace—and maybe victory—may come within their grasps. The story and characters here are strong; Reddick fleshes out both protagonists’ worlds with thought and compassion. In the present day in particular, chapters from Jeff’s and Jess’ mothers’ perspectives lend depth to the shifting conflicts. It’s also noteworthy that, for a novel so grounded in the realities of science and conservation, Piah’s Molalla faith is treated with genuine respect and reverence. The only problem is that the prose can be somewhat stilted at times: “One of her first projects had been to hire a professional photographer to take pictures of the Nesika, both above and below the dams. She put the photos together in a beautiful book called The River’s Cry that she hoped would help people better understand the need to completely restore the spawning grounds above the Green Springs dam.” While it’s a shame that these moments will sometimes pull readers out of the book, the majority of the description, narration, and dialogue is smooth and evocative.
History, science, and heart make for a read that’s both cozy and complex.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-483-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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