Skillfully weaves together two significant events in Canadian history.
A teenager comes of age amid a period of technological advances and controversy in the first novel in Warren’s Centrewood Cycle.
In the fall of 1957, 13-year-old Lois Michelsen and her family move from their home in Unionville to Centrewood, a model community in Toronto. Lois’ mother wants her to make friends, and she arranges for her to walk to school with another new student. Lois starts having a series of what she calls “waking visions.” While the teenager adjusts to school, her father, Graham, prepares for a milestone in Canadian aviation history. He is the lead engineer for the Avro Arrow, a state-of-the-art supersonic aircraft. While attending the Arrow rollout in Malton, Lois has a series of visions of indigenous people “mouthing sorrow and grief.” Graham is skeptical of these visions, but he investigates her story and discovers a possible connection between it and the land claims of First Nations Mississauga. His search leads the family to a chief and tribal elder who may be able to provide the appropriate insight and history. Warren has crafted a lavishly detailed debut that combines the intimacy of a bildungsroman with the epic sweep of a historical novel. Lois is an appealing, resourceful heroine whose maturation provides the emotional center of a multilayered narrative and well-developed cast. The imagery in some scenes, however, is incongruous with the serious and thoughtful tone of the novel. For example, the muscles of Mitsy’s calves are described as resembling “the knotted rawhide you see in specialty pet food stores for dogs.” But the stories of the Avro Arrow and First Nations Mississauga are well-detailed, and Warren includes a section of photographs and illustrations that depict the layout of Centrewood, the rollout of the Avro Arrow, and key figures in the tribal land claims.
Skillfully weaves together two significant events in Canadian history.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 466
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
BOOK REVIEW
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