by Richard M. Brock ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 2, 2021
A shaggy, satirical sendup in the finest American tradition.
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A middle-grade novel concocts a modern tall tale starring a precocious, continent-trotting 12-year-old boy.
Young Ruby Finn Heckler of Hackers Loon, New York, is being interviewed by the FBI. “I don’t know why they gave it to me, just to answer your question right off,” he says, in regard to his odd name. “I never knew my mom and dad—they’re dead—so I couldn’t get the story straight from them.” The trouble started when Ruby’s best friend, Quinn Hennessey, showed him the 22-caliber rifle he had stolen from Old Man Chilson’s shed. When they accidentally shot a deer, they left the corpse at the local Gennelich-owned lumber mill in the hopes that one of the men would take it home. Instead, the scion of the powerful Gennelich family claimed the dead deer was a warning from the Mexican cartels and began to secretly stage other “attacks” to terrify the locals into voting for his preferred candidate. When the man burned down the church and tried to blame it on Muslim terrorists, Ruby—who was in the church moments before—feared he would be held responsible instead. He tried to hide on a bus, fell asleep, and ended up in Albany, and then—well, long story short, the cowboy-loving Ruby and Quinn ended up encountering a man named Douglas “Lodgepole” Pine and his Helical Unfolded militia in the real-life, modern American West. That’s when the real craziness began. Brock’s (Cross Dog Blues, 2015) prose is a perfect blend of Mark Twain-style color undercut by modern humor. When Ruby and Quinn fear they’ve been cursed, they try to buy a potion from the forest-dwelling Widow Jones, who responds to their query with “I’ve told you boys a million times! Do not call me Widow Jones.” But the true brilliance of the author’s pastiche adventure is convincing readers that present-day America—with its extremists, crooks, demagogues, and guns—is just as madcap as the 1870s version. Ruby and Quinn are a Tom and Huck for the 21st century, and through their naive eyes, readers see how absurd the nation has always been.
A shaggy, satirical sendup in the finest American tradition.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9911320-6-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bogie Road Publishing, Ltd.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
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
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