A deadly game involving a dangerous girl that does have a winner: the reader.
A secret fertility experiment goes wrong in this thriller.
In Dalrymple’s (The Sense of Reckoning, 2015, etc.) latest novel, new parents Patrick and Charlotte Ballard are grateful to Gerard Bonnay; his wife, Dr. Louise Mortensen; and their fertility company, Vivantem, for helping them conceive what seems like a normal child. But when Lizzy is age 4, she changes. One afternoon, she gets upset when she falls and cuts her lip; her mother fares far worse. She gets a searing headache, which is literally Lizzy’s fault. It is the first of many times the girl becomes upset and inflicts a small stroke on her mother. Lizzy does the same thing to a classmate at preschool. “I squeezed his head,” she says about a boy who colored in her book. Lizzy can’t help her bad behavior; it’s in her DNA. Before she was born, Bonnay and Mortensen tinkered with her chromosomes in hopes of developing a telepath. Although not telepathic, Lizzy certainly has a unique talent—causing a person’s brain to bleed. After her parents recognize Lizzy’s power, Charlotte moves with her to a remote cabin to avoid her “squeezing” anyone else’s head and to ensure no one can discover her secret. Patrick visits the cabin on weekends, and a hired housekeeper, Ruby DiMano, comes on weekdays. Unbeknown to the Ballards, Bonnay pays Ruby to spy on the family. Unbeknown to Bonnay, Mitchell Pieda, another Vivantem baby, has developed the skills to “squeeze” and to read minds. Pieda isn’t reluctant to use his dual abilities. Once he reconnects with the Vivantem team, they decide to eliminate formidable Lizzy, now in her late teens. Dalrymple has written a fast-paced, complex thriller that can keep a reader engaged and off-kilter until its foreboding conclusion. The Vivantem conspirators chillingly term Lizzy “an experiment that didn’t work out.” The anxiety of protecting a child at all costs is palpable, as is the terror of not being able to control one’s own urges, however devastating they might be. A scene with Lizzy, Patrick, and a loud cellphone caller in a train’s “quiet car” is particularly unnerving. Readers should hope the author conceives of a sequel.
A deadly game involving a dangerous girl that does have a winner: the reader.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9862675-2-9
Page Count: 358
Publisher: William Kingsfield Publishers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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