An action-packed but melodramatic war tale.
In this historical novel, a friendly rivalry turns bitter when two pilots find themselves on opposing sides as World War II breaks out.
In the 1930s, Aaron Miller and Michael “Miki” von Steuven are both students at Princeton University and the best of friends, despite hailing from radically disparate backgrounds. Aaron’s father is a Polish immigrant who moved to New York nearly penniless and built a wildly successful construction business. Miki grew up in Westphalia; his father is a German noble and the family’s prestige and wealth are tied to an ancient pedigree. But both students are talented pilots, and bond over the amateur races they enter and routinely dominate. These competitions are thrillingly portrayed by January (co-author: Frankenstein Diaries, 2015). The pilots’ friendship, though, is complicated by a shared passion for Lacy Dunbrough. While she loves Aaron, she’s perpetually frustrated by his unserious impetuosity, and her family unabashedly prefers Miki. Miki proposes to Lacy and she accepts. The two move to Germany but she is quickly dismayed by Hitler’s increasingly ominous rule and the malignant treatment of the nation’s Jewish population. Miki joins the Luftwaffe and is sent to Spain, and Lacy begins to worry that he has changed in some profound way she cannot countenance. Meanwhile, Aaron decides to decamp for Canada to join the Royal Air Force, eager to do his part as war finally breaks out in Europe. A grand showdown of sorts between the two expert aviators seems theatrically inevitable, and the emotional stakes are effectively raised when Aaron believes Miki’s shot down one of his closest friends. In his propulsive tale, January vividly captures the fast-paced terror of combat in the air, and the peculiar mixture of precision and bravado displayed by the best pilots. But the predictable plot strains readers’ credulity, and the writing is as unreservedly histrionic as it is formulaic.
An action-packed but melodramatic war tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 343
Publisher: Winged Lion Publications
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2018
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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