A brutal political battle that may be too much for some readers.
Midden’s (One Voice Too Many, 2011, etc.) deeply disturbing novel about the fracturing of modern America opens with Joe Biden’s nightmare of Barack Obama’s assassination.
Coming out of the divisive real-life landscape of politics in the past decade, this macabre tale revolves around a U.S.-based insurrection, the likes of which has not been seen since the Civil War. In an attempt to gain power and enable the country to be remade, a handful of influential businessmen, clergymen and others—some of whom fit the M.O. of Donald Trump, Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter—plan the hostile takeover of several key government institutions, including Fort Knox and the Capitol, as well as dissenting men and women, such as some professors and elected officials. Rev. Abner Bellamy of Georgia, brothers George and David Blinder, and Daniel Keenan each undergo the same shirking of faith in government—supposedly emblematic of the real anger of the political right—and lead the rebellious Sovereign Citizens group. Harvey Winkelstein, a gunrunner and physics professor, provides the ammo. On the other side, a handful of valiant operatives under Max Grabel of the CIA, his contract worker Marie LeBrun, and her lover and PI/contract worker, Samantha Stranger, work diligently to find out just who’s leading the scheme and how it can be stopped. Interlaced with informative exposition designed to further detail the political context, the narrative can sometimes sound like a flat professor: “Ultimately, it was this group that determined that the time was ripe for an escalation of hostilities and an outright dismantling of the United States of America.” Overall, though, the plot moves with enough speed to keep readers engaged. With an abrupt cliffhanger, the story doesn’t quite come together in the end—it’s as though readers are watching Zero Dark Thirty without knowing the crucial outcome—but Midden’s underlying aim of establishing the angry, partisan undertones of the current political climate is remarkably effective. This battle isn’t for the faint of heart, however, as the surreal yet eerily plausible extension of current politics will elicits some chills.
A brutal political battle that may be too much for some readers.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 313
Publisher: Wittmann Blair
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2013
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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