A touching, heartfelt story with a healthy measure of hope.
In Stewart’s (Ray vs the Meaning of Life, 2018, etc.) novel, a Toronto teen searches for the transplant patients who received organs from his late twin sister.
The death of 16-year-old car-accident victim Minnie Highland has understandably shattered the remaining members of her family. Since she died six weeks ago, her father has refused to even say her name, and her mother has spent her days doing nothing but lying around the house. Minnie’s twin brother, Emmitt, becomes motivated by an anonymous letter that he receives from a woman who received Minnie’s heart, signed “Heart Daughter, Heart Sister.” He wants to help his parents overcome their depression by locating all the recipients of his sister’s organs, metaphorically reuniting the “pieces of Minnie.” He does this artistically by tracking down and filming willing organ recipients and editing their responses into old film footage of Minnie asking questions (such as “If you were an animal, what would you be?”). However, Emmitt finds that a few recipients, including a drunk and a racist, don’t seem to have been truly worthy of Minnie’s donations. He comes to feel that his project will only be complete when he tracks down his original inspiration, “Heart Daughter, Heart Sister.” He contacts her through the National Transplant Organization, but for unexplained reasons, she doesn’t want to reveal her identity or meet with him. His determination to find her leads him into trouble—and a few unexpected plot turns. Stewart’s story is ultimately uplifting despite its grim setup. He shows how Emmitt gradually comes to care for the various recipients he meets, although helping Joey, an alcoholic with Minnie’s liver, proves to be an arduous undertaking. Emmitt is definitely an eccentric protagonist with an offbeat outlook; at one point, for instance, he tells a recipient that his sister was a taxidermist: “You’re like a dead thing, and now you’ve had life stuffed into you.” As such, he’s refreshingly distinctive, as are other characters such as recipient Dennis, who has a deep fondness for Korean pop music and gleefully aids in Emmitt’s search. The book’s most profound moments, though, are Emmitt’s creatively filmed segments, which play out in the text in screenplay format.
A touching, heartfelt story with a healthy measure of hope.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
