by Matt Bondurant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 10, 2012
The most important unplumbed depths are those of Elly’s character. That said, Bondurant has written another nervy, robust...
Sinister forces disrupt attempts by American ex-pats to run a pub in rural Ireland.
Bondurant is drawn to the wild and the extreme. His last novel (The Wettest County in the World, 2008, etc.) dealt with violent bootleggers in West Virginia. In his third novel he turns to a death-haunted Irish island. Fred and Elly, a young American married couple, are always up for a challenge; no half-measures for them. They have a great love of liquor, literature and (in narrator Elly’s case) deep-water swimming. She’s six feet tall, with “skin like a walrus.” In the aftermath of 9/11, Fred leaves the corporate world when he wins a brewing company’s contest to become the owner of a pub in Baltimore in southwestern Ireland. As a bonus, they are paid-up guests at a bed-and-breakfast on wind-blasted Cape Clear Island. There are two stories here. One is of a marriage strained by Elly’s frequent absences on the island. The vast ocean depths are a dream come true; she does two foolhardy swims to a lighthouse, marvelously described, the high points of the novel. She is more afraid of motherhood than the ocean swells, retreating into herself as Fred, with barely any customers, busies himself with his 9/11 novel. Is the marriage going through a rough patch or irretrievably broken? Bondurant’s indecision weakens the novel. Then there’s the other story of the autocratic rule of the Corrigan clan. Descended from Ireland’s first saint, they do not tolerate outsiders. They particularly resent Highgate, a blind old goat farmer with an international crew of volunteers who frequent Fred’s pub. Tensions mount in a twisty plot that eventually implodes.
The most important unplumbed depths are those of Elly’s character. That said, Bondurant has written another nervy, robust and suspenseful novel.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2529-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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BOOK REVIEW
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Max Brooks
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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