A shaggy, satirical sendup in the finest American tradition.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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