An often diverting tale that bubbles with suspense.
In DeCamp’s debut middle-grade fantasy thriller, two small-town boys searching for their abducted friend get a helping hand from beings from another dimension.
In the quiet Indiana town of Cutters Notch, 12-year-olds Josh Gillis and Danny Flannery are best friends with a slightly older teenage tomboy, Hope Spencer. The trio spends a September day playing basketball, oblivious that they’re being closely watched. After they go their separate ways, only Josh and Danny make it home. Hope’s frantic mother, Maggie Spencer, gets in touch with the cops, starting with her state-trooper neighbor, Rick Anders, and everyone assumes the worst when they find Hope’s abandoned phone and basketball. Maggie’s worried that her abusive ex-husband is responsible for Hope’s disappearance even though he’s supposed to be in jail. Josh and Danny, meanwhile, suspect creepy old neighbor Willie Robbins to be the kidnapper. Cops and parents impede the boys’ attempts to take part in the search, but the two get assistance from an unlikely source: three beings named Gavin, Gronek, and Smakal from the Arboreal Realm. They invite Josh and Danny to travel into their dimension (via something called “the shimmer”) so that they’ll have the opportunity to rescue Hope from someone—or something—monstrous. DeCamp’s novel centers on the story’s thriller qualities in scenes of Hope in captivity, looking for a means of escape. The otherworldly aspects of the tale, meanwhile, are less distinctive; Gavin and his two companions, for example, remain mysterious, as many questions about their back story and home realm remain unanswered at the end of the story. The tension is high throughout, though, thanks to menacing and relentless villains; it’s also sprinkled with forbidding, dark-fantasy prose: “all was now silent in the woods”; “The bright orb had followed its course into the western sky.” The story will surely appeal to younger readers (the instances of violence are never over-the-top), and it manages quite a few surprises, such as the revelation of the abductors’ twisted plan. The ending hints at more in store for the people of Cutters Notch.
An often diverting tale that bubbles with suspense.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2017
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
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