Ranging from grim to tender, these stories reveal the hardships facing a young Native American in contemporary America.
In 12 linked stories, all narrated by a character named David, Talty’s debut collection provides an unsparing perspective on the harsh reality of life in the Panawahpskek (Penobscot) Nation of Maine.
Drug addiction, mental illness, and economic insecurity haunt Talty’s characters, whose personal flaws and straitened circumstances combine to keep them trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair. As a child, in the story “In a Jar,” David lives with his mother and her partner, Frick, a part-time medicine man and equally part-time father figure, when his pregnant older sister, Paige, arrives to ratchet up the tension in the family’s already overburdened life. By the time David reaches young adulthood, as portrayed in stories like “Burn” and “Get Me Some Medicine,” he’s hanging out with Fellis, his friend and fellow visitor to the local methadone clinic. The pair spend their evenings drinking and contemplating how they’ll get their hands on “pins” (Klonopin), culminating in the story “Half-Life,” in which David asks himself, “How’d we get here?” but then wonders whether “the only question that matters” is “How do we get out of here?” For all his stories’ terse realism, Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Nation, is adept at unearthing his characters’ emotions, as he does in the elegiac “The Blessing Tobacco,” in which David’s grandmother, well down the road of cognitive decline, believes he’s her late brother Robbie, who died as a young boy, and fiendishly punishes him to exorcise her guilt for her role in Robbie’s long-ago death. David’s observation in the story “Earth, Speak” that “this reservation was for the dead” serves as a mournful benediction over these bleak, but empathetic, tales.
Ranging from grim to tender, these stories reveal the hardships facing a young Native American in contemporary America.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953-53418-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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