Despite an implausible climax, Atteberry does justice to the genre in a charmingly played romance with plenty of twists...
A kind-hearted jazz musician meets the love of his life and tries to save her from an abusive husband in this suspenseful romantic thriller.
An Orlando-based jazz pianist and music teacher, Jeremy Conner is reluctant to take on new students, let alone one who’s a 10-year-old child. But he soon finds himself enamored with the talented young Emily Swindell, and even more enamored with her gorgeous, charming mother, Tracey. As their friendship blossoms, Jeremy discovers the dark truth beneath Tracey’s “perfect wife” façade: She’s trapped in an abusive marriage with Eric, her controlling, alcoholic husband. Connected by their love for jazz, Jeremy and Tracey inevitably fall in love, but Atteberry (Let It Go, 2010, etc.) includes plenty of twists to sustain the suspense. Eric enlists his buddy, Ryan, to spy on Tracey, not realizing that Ryan is obsessed with Tracey and has ulterior motives. Ryan, with the help of his tech-savvy cousin, plants a tracking device on Tracey’s car and follows her every move. Jeremy, “a man of faith, character, and high standards,” finds himself questioning his relationship with God as he witnesses Tracey’s suffering. Tracey, meanwhile, tries to appease her increasingly volatile husband while plotting an escape. Although the novel veers into darker territory, Atteberry tempers the narrative with wit and humor, and a sure-footed, breezy style enhanced with snappy dialogue. Among the colorful cast of characters, a few lean toward caricature—as is the case with Eric, whose transformation from a doting husband into a violent “psycho” is never fully explained. Also, the focus on faith and religion feels distracting at times; it gets in the way of the plot instead of helping it. The novel is most compelling when dealing with the everyday choices, challenges and fears of its characters. Romance and jazz added to the mix makes for a potent cocktail.
Despite an implausible climax, Atteberry does justice to the genre in a charmingly played romance with plenty of twists along the way.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Palisade
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
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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