by Pete KJ ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 23, 2014
An often engaging saga of personal mistakes and shared redemption.
KJ’s (The Year We Roamed, 2013, etc.) novel follows two men across six decades—and across America’s racial divide.
Troy Dove and Vincent Taylor first meet as students at the Maple Leaf Elementary School in Northeast Seattle in 1972. Vincent is a white student from the neighborhood, while Troy is one of a few African-American students bussed in as part of a desegregation program. Vincent quickly admires Troy and befriends him. They briefly share such childhood moments as kickball games, discussions of first crushes, and after-school fishing trips—before their racist environment separates them. As the years go by, their lives take very different directions. Vincent finishes his time at Maple Leaf, then goes on to high school, college, an internship in London, and—for a time—a successful marriage and career. Troy, on the other hand, begins to suffer as soon as he’s transferred to an elementary school in his own impoverished neighborhood. He becomes addicted to drugs in his teenage years and cycles deeper and deeper into a life of violence and incarceration. Interwoven throughout the two men’s narratives are stories of Vincent’s aunt, Shirley, and of a compassionate woman named Dolores Moffat, who struggles to find a meaningful place for herself in the world. The novel’s scope is impressive, following multiple life stories from the racially charged 1970s, through the crack epidemic of the late ’80s, to the present day, and beyond. Following these characters through the years can sometimes be disorienting; KJ skips from one to another in quick succession, often before readers have a chance to become fully engaged with a particular person’s plight. The connections between the various narratives can also be tangential or rely too heavily on coincidence or sentimentality. That said, highly detailed portraits of Vincent and Troy emerge over the course of the novel as the author walks through their crimes, transgressions, and regrets. He fully immerses readers in the characters’ memories, as well as their healing processes.
An often engaging saga of personal mistakes and shared redemption.Pub Date: May 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1492270928
Page Count: 408
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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