A gloomy, sometimes-alarming tale of alcoholism, one that questions whether a drunk can blame the drink or his own...
Jones’ somber first novel is the story of a man whose alcoholism weighs on his own life and the lives of his family, particularly his teenage son.
Working as an electrician, Wayne Reed was knocked off a ladder by a live wire—an 18-foot drop that left him with a mangled foot. While his wife, Emily, is stationed in Guam with the Navy, Wayne largely ignores his 15-year-old son, Charles, and invests the family’s meager finances in an excess of booze. Not much changes when Emily returns, until the tire company, whose negligence resulted in Wayne’s injury, avoids further legal troubles by offering the Reeds nearly $1.7 million. Wayne talks Emily into moving to an apple orchard, where they can live and run the business. But Wayne—still hung up on Cassandra, with whom he had an affair years ago—has no plans on saving his family. Meanwhile, Charles, an intelligent young man and accomplished runner, joins the high school track team, but his father’s continued drinking threatens to squander any hope of happiness for the Reed family. Jones’ bleak novel is almost completely devoid of comedic or lighthearted moments. But it’s also engrossing. Wayne’s behavior is self-obsessive, and seemingly everything he does, from reuniting with Cassandra to spending much of his time at a bar, adversely affects everyone he knows. Split into four parts, the book mostly covers about two years in the early 1990s, but the most illuminating section is Part 2, a flashback to several months between 1986 and 1987, when Wayne’s assignment for the Army Reserves was more an extended affair with Cassandra. It’s a comprehensive display of his disinterest in marriage as well as the physical and emotional mistreatment of Charles; for instance, Wayne insists he run a 10K so the father can slyly introduce his son to his mistress. The latter half of the novel devotes perhaps too much to Wayne, who does little more than drink while boasting about his Porsche and fruitlessly attempting to repair his relationship with Cassandra. Charles, on the other hand, gradually turns into the more compelling of the two; he begins his own downward spiral when his anger surfaces, thanks in part to an incident that puts him in the hospital and sidelines his running. From there, a disturbing concept arises: Charles may someday become the same man he fears and despises.
A gloomy, sometimes-alarming tale of alcoholism, one that questions whether a drunk can blame the drink or his own wickedness.Pub Date: April 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988886421
Page Count: 440
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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