A clear voice and the occasional moment of beauty can’t quite overcome the scattershot throughline and flat writing.
An exotic dancer in Seattle turns to the stars to guide her through a tumultuous love life in this scattershot but occasionally affecting novel.
Transpiring over the 1980s and 1990s, the narrative follows Molly, who turned to exotic dancing in college as a way to pay the bills and never really gave it up. For Molly, the freedom and position of strength in her sexual relationships are too empowering, even after earning her degree and working as a stockbroker for a time. However, despite her distaste for a traditional life, she is not immune to the siren call of love, and she pursues a relationship with a philosophy professor, even moving to the East Coast to be with him. Yet the professor has secrets of his own, and the astrological charts that Molly consults—both the ones she constructs and the ones she hires a professional to create—indicate that as far as the stars are concerned, true love won’t be hers for some time, no matter what cost she’s willing to pay. As might be expected from a work that is somewhat autobiographical, the narrative is impressionistic at times, written in a clear voice with the texture and flow of memories; however, it is also seemingly dependent on the audience’s having some prior knowledge of the author or the basic story, as there is a good deal of context left out. There are very few references to time, for example; only a handful of cultural references (Madonna, Britney Spears, the Vanessa Williams’ Penthouse pictures scandal) allow for any kind of historical anchoring of the story. Further complicating that matter is the fact that the narrative is told somewhat nonlinearly, with occasional jumping ahead or flashing back without any kind of clear marking, only textual hints. Finally, despite clarity of the author’s voice and cleanly written action, emotions and reverberations around those actions are flat and muted, which makes the occasional poetic turn of phrase all the more startling but not common enough.
A clear voice and the occasional moment of beauty can’t quite overcome the scattershot throughline and flat writing.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2015
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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