by Mike Bond ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 15, 2013
Will make readers sweat with its relentless pace and blistering descriptions of the African sun.
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A special unit of soldiers in East Africa tracks down elephant poachers and searches for a female archaeologist who’s been kidnapped in Bond’s latest adventure (Saving Paradise, 2013, etc.).
Ian MacAdam, formerly of the British Special Forces, is living an unhappy married life on an African ranch. He agrees to join a team to combat poachers targeting Kenya’s elephants, which are dangerously low in numbers. But when a trio of Somali men assault a camp of archaeologists, it becomes personal for MacAdam. One of the people taken hostage is Rebecca Hecht, MacAdam’s former girlfriend. He braves the vast, unforgiving desert to rescue the woman he still loves. The novel is sheer intensity, depicting the immense, arid land and never-ending scenes of people trekking across it. The villains are clear from the beginning: a Samburu warrior survives the harsh desert and its resident animals only to be gunned down by a Somali poacher, simply for the warrior’s lion pelt. Despite this, the three men holding Rebecca captive—Ibrahim, Rashid and Warwar—are so strongly developed that the youngest, Warwar, is almost sympathetic (to both readers and Rebecca); though he wants to sell or ransom the woman, the other two see no value in her and would rather kill her. The fierce African heat radiates from the pages; mosquitoes zoom around characters, and the air burns MacAdam’s throat, while his perspiration blinds him. But it’s the volatile nature of nature itself that gives the story its greatest distinction; Kenya is inhabited by creatures both beautiful and menacing. That MacAdam is out to save the elephants doesn’t stop a buffalo from charging him; when Rebecca tries to escape her captors, she realizes that a trailing leopard could be a much more unpleasant enemy. Readers should brace themselves for the book’s unabated savagery, mostly, if not all, from its human characters: A scene of poachers attacking and killing elephants is not easy to forget. But it does allow for a bit of zealous glee when MacAdam convinces himself to help track down poachers “to hunt the only animal worth hunting.”
Will make readers sweat with its relentless pace and blistering descriptions of the African sun.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1627040082
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mandevilla Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2016
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith & Emily Yae Won
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