This placid tale about strangers converging on a farmhouse celebrates the joy of planning.
In this debut novel, coincidence brings people together to form an accidental family centered on an old woman’s farmhouse.
Somewhere in mountainous Northeastern America stands a farmhouse owned by Mrs. Edith Bradley, but most people call her Aunt Edith. Blind and elderly, she manages well with the help of Russell Mayhew, her handyman. But one stormy night, a hurricane sends a tree crashing onto the roof, unheard by Russell; Aunt Edith is trapped. At the same time, Samantha Anne Matthews—called Sam—arrives at the farmhouse. Having just broken up with her fiance and quit her job, she was on her way to a solo camping vacation, but her car went off the storm-crumbled roadway. Sam calls a doctor for Aunt Edith, who has a broken leg, and when he asks Sam to stay and provide moral support, she agrees. Russell decides to restart his construction company; with Sam’s background in advertising, she can help there too. Also showing up at the farmhouse are Abigail Winters, a woman running from her abusive husband, and her half brother, Dr. Jeffery Dale Barlow, who has tracked Abbi down to tell her that her spouse was killed in an accident. They, too, stick around. A series of coincidences brings to town yet more characters, including Edith’s grandson William Bradley Brackston and Sam’s roommate, Melissa, and everyone gets partnered with fulfilling work and romance. Together they form an extended family whose linchpin becomes Edith, now called Granny Edie. Barring a dramatic episode on a cruise ship, where Edith is kidnapped and leaves an SOS message stitched into a baby blanket, Apelt’s novel consists almost entirely of people making plans. Working out the logistics for Russell’s construction company, Abbi’s costume-sewing business, repairs and renovations to the farmhouse—every detail is described with relish and at length. Those without a taste for project management will likely find little to engage them. Coincidence is the main plot engine, ensuring that things fall conveniently into place. Some readers may agree with Granny that this “is surely a sign from God that He truly is the Master Planner,” and enjoy the way everything fits; others may find all the easy resolutions and conflict-free family life to be unsatisfying.
This placid tale about strangers converging on a farmhouse celebrates the joy of planning.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
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
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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