An intriguing portrait of one American’s life north of the border during the Vietnam era.
Jones, a veteran Canadian playwright, provides an engaging twist on the nurture-versus-nature conundrum in this novel.
In the late 1960s, Jake Chin, a California teenager, enlists in the U.S. Marines to fulfill a sense of familial obligation. Like many other young men of his generation, he gets sent off to Vietnam to keep the geopolitical dominoes from falling. This enables his twin brother, Harry, his father’s favorite, to attend college instead of him. But Jake demands a steep price for sparing his brother: “Since Harry goes to college and I go to Vietnam, Dad gives me the winery....Mom gets it if I die.” While attending the Defense Linguistics Institute, Jake meets his good friend Bohdan Chin, a Canadian volunteer born on the same date as Jake, and the “Double Chins” end up serving in Special Operations together. The pair soon grow to hate the war, and when a tragedy hands Jake a way out, he takes it. To do so, however, he leaves behind his country and family and begins a new life. He enjoys a new relationship, makes new friends and attends college, all the while fearing that his deception will fall apart. As a result, he accepts that he’ll have to evolve as a person. Jones skillfully uses Jake’s emotional metamorphosis to provide a window on the tumultuous times of the late 1960s and early ’70s. Specifically, he shows how the war declined in popularity and how radical youth upended American culture. The author also includes a liberal dose of suspense, as circumstances keep sending Jake back to his California home. He even mixes in a little mysticism, as well, with a wise Laotian rebel who pops up at key moments to bail Jake out of trouble. The result is a heady brew that will have readers rooting for Jake during the many difficult changes in his life.
An intriguing portrait of one American’s life north of the border during the Vietnam era.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499784060
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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