A vision of hell with many inventive creations that ultimately overwhelms rather than impresses.
A man descends into the underworld on a strange odyssey to find his late bride in Blunk’s wacky satire.
When high school English teacher Sherwood “Woody” McCormick’s wife Abbie dies in a plane crash only one day after their wedding, Woody is left reeling and seeking answers about fate, the universe, and the nature of God. He turns to lonely waitresses, unorthodox preachers, and psychics eager to shake him down before an Angel appears and intervenes. “You’ve not been searching for God. You’ve been searching for your late wife,” the heavenly figure informs him before offering Woody an unbelievable opportunity: Woody will be allowed to visit hell in an effort to find Abbie and get some closure on her untimely death. In a flash, Woody is hurled into a mass of deceased people receiving their orientation at the Greater Babylonian Civic Center, where a flashy emcee proclaims that hell is actually a fantastic place—in fact, it’s “the only place to be.” Far from the fire and brimstone pits of popular imagination, Woody discovers that hell is actually a buzzing, endless metropolis with an inscrutable economy (everything only costs one “Tetzel,” which is simultaneously worth everything and nothing), a false promise of eternal youth, and fancy seven-course dinners that never truly satisfy. Countless kooky characters start to come out of the woodwork offering to guide Woody through this strange alternate reality. Among them, Woody meets the smoke-breathing Nancy McGill, the seductive Vanya Subramanian and her daughter Prissy (who is, in fact, a giant frog), and a sex worker with a heart of gold and an extreme case of halitosis named Exie. Unsure of who to trust, Woody finds himself adrift in a topsy-turvy world where the price he might have to pay for what he wants is himself.
Blunk’s modern-day Orpheus story is bursting with clever ideas and quirky characters that jump off the page in rapid succession, calling to mind the numerous idiosyncratic figures populating the works of Kurt Vonnegut, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In the same vein, Woody’s journey is epic in both scale and absurdity. Here, hell is an exaggerated American mega-city with an endless sprawl of traffic, dizzying skyscrapers, and distressing urban decay that gets summed up by Exie as “nothing more than a pigsty with crosstown subway service.” The book’s satirical barbs seem to be aimed at pretentious city dwellers who barter in delusions of grandeur. (Hell’s bogus economic system is probably Blunk’s most ingenious idea, as it sets up plenty of wonderful jokes and bigger, philosophical notions about value.) But, with so many characters and ideas vying for attention, the author’s point gets lost in the cacophony. There is hardly a moment to understand or sympathize with Woody as a protagonist before he is thrown, at a breakneck pace, from one outrageous situation to the next. At the same time, his strangely passive responses and infuriating naïveté will leave readers feeling as disoriented as he is; is the joke supposed to be on him or on the numerous ghouls that are trying to take him for a ride? Blunk’s whirlwind tour of hell ultimately offers more confusion than answers, but there are plenty of surprising and fun stops along the way.
A vision of hell with many inventive creations that ultimately overwhelms rather than impresses.Pub Date: April 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798218972592
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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