A glitzy romp that features suburban wives making unconventional—and haphazardly disastrous—attempts to break out of the...
A modern comedy of manners set in a posh Atlanta suburb follows a group of married women.
The latest novel from Pullen (Regrets Only, 2016) opens with a fun, fizzy premise that reads like something straight out of Boccaccio’s Decameron: Some wives in the well-to-do Atlanta suburb of Sugar Mills are, for varying reasons, mildly unhappy in their blissful marriages. Live-and-let-live Jess Rodriguez, a presentation editor for a management consulting firm, loves her husband, Tom, and her 9-year-old daughter, Mina—but even she can’t deny that a certain spark has been missing for a while. PTA goddess Maizy Henriksson, veteran of “endless Tupperware containers of brownies and cookies and muffins whenever the occasion demanded it,” is likewise suffering from a sense of malaise that isn’t helped by the fact that everybody considers her the reliable one. Ambitious Delia Cargill, a whiz at direct-sales house gatherings and other retail pyramid schemes, is desperate to move up in Sugar Mills society and the ranks of the Sugar Mills Country Club. She ingratiates herself to glamorous club members like two-time women’s NCAA tennis champion Carras Lightbourne Prather, who’s got a private dissatisfaction of her own: the long struggle she and her “sweet, unremarkable” husband have endured in their efforts to conceive a child, encompassing “two years of folk wisdom, Internet remedies, injections and very expensive failed IVF cycles.” There’s a lot of inertia and frustration in this “sleepy, affluent suburb, where the biggest conflicts were about trim paint color.” These residents are all thrown into delightful turmoil by Belinda Hayes-Currington, “one of those super-moms who served on every committee imaginable for her three gorgeous, towheaded children,” who’s recently started taking private tennis lesson from hunky, 20-something freelance instructor (and, it turns out, freelance gigolo) Parker Yung. The appearance of Parker has fired Belinda’s once-oblivious husband, Orson, with renewed romantic zeal. This is a classic comedic development that Pullen—a veteran of this kind of smart, sharp Jilly Cooper–style, guilty-pleasure fiction—manages to near perfection. In quick, confident strokes, she draws her characters in all their conflicting natures, from crass ambition to hapless confusion and everything in between. Even the author’s less savory characters—Delia at her most self-absorbed, for instance, or Belinda virtually every time she opens her mouth—come across as entirely, believably human. The beefcake at the heart of the chaos, gorgeous Parker, ends up having refreshing extra dimensions as well. And as Pullen throws more and more complications into the misadventures of her characters (who end up feeling like they’re on “a rollercoaster ride intended for someone else”), hurdles that grow to include much darker motives, bribery, and extortion, the narrative stays perfectly on point and controlled. The author systematically dismantles the contentment of her very comfortable characters while also keeping the story bouncing with zippy, involving dialogue and a fine sense of dramatic pacing.
A glitzy romp that features suburban wives making unconventional—and haphazardly disastrous—attempts to break out of the safe patterns of their lives.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Freshwater Ink
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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