A disturbing tale of love, ambition, despair, and redemption.
Rosenberg’s historical novel fictionalizes the struggles of the real-life Silver Dollar Tabor, the troubled daughter of Colorado “Silver King” Horace Tabor and his wife, Baby Doe.
The Tabor family, who once dominated the Colorado silver market while garnering riches, fame, and political power, has suffered drastic reversals of fortune. First, there was the scandal of United States senator Horace Tabor leaving his first wife to marry the controversial Baby Doe. Then came the silver crash, and Horace, who had all of his money invested in their Matchless Mine, lost everything. They moved from the splendor of Denver to the isolation of a shack next to the mine in Leadville. Horace died when his daughter Silver Dollar was still a child; a month later, her older sister Lily, whom she adored, left home. Silver was devasted—enter her imaginary playmate, Echo LaVode. When Silver finally leaves home, determined to become a movie star, Echo travels with her, packed comfortably in the further recesses of her mind. Silver, a talented singer and dancer, becomes a big player in movies. Down on her luck, she attempts the Slide for Life Challenge, a daring high-wire stunt spanning Denver’s Lake Rhoda. Attached to the wire only by a metal mouthpiece, she steps off the platform and begins sailing through the air…until she hits a snag in the wire. This darkly complex, twisty novel toggles between narratives occurring during two different time periods: Silver Dollar’s struggles from 1915 through 1925, and the ordeals of Baby Doe, still laboring at the Matchless Mine in 1932. Setting her tale against the evocative backdrop of Mob-controlled 1920s Chicago speakeasies, Rosenberg vividly brings to life the gradual, angry, and violent emergence of Echo as Silver’s increasingly dominant alter ego, a persona who exacts vengeance and precipitates mayhem while Silver “sleeps.” The author’s prose is riveting and meticulously detailed in scenes like Silver’s aerial stunt; she also composes lyrically magical passages, as when Silver becomes a tiger tamer (“The tigers emerged from the shadows, their massive forms filling the cage, magnificent stripes swirling like molten lava in the dappled sunlight”) and develops a mesmerizing relationship with the powerful wild cats.
A disturbing tale of love, ambition, despair, and redemption.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2025
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
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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