An unconventional and enthralling tale of a personal awakening.
A woman confronts hard times that jolt her out of a fuguelike complacency in this novel.
While languishing yet another day at a dead-end office job, Faith Ellis is paid an unannounced visit from a federal marshal, Daniel “Danny” Myers, who is in search of her husband, Ray. Faith isn’t surprised—Ray has always been a wayward partner: unfaithful, indigent, and sometimes even inclined to criminal behavior. Faith finds Ray’s secret stash in the apartment: a gun, 143 mysterious receipts, and $36,000 in cash. Worried that she might somehow be implicated in whatever crimes he has committed, Faith walks away from her job and sets out to find him, tracking down each receipt. She gradually becomes bolder, taking more and more investigative risks, and then begins a romance with a computer-programming genius who teaches her to become a well-compensated webmaster. Faith pulls herself out of deep emotional doldrums, and her search for her missing husband transforms into a rediscovery of the joy of life. She feels attractive again, finds purpose and reward in work, and even takes up jogging. But just as she gives up hope of finding the man she no longer needs, his presence in her life reasserts itself with a grim ferocity. Reed deftly captures the perspective of his female protagonist, who begins the novel a pliable victim and graduates to an aggressive heroine. Much of the dialogue is delightfully quirky—Danny gives Faith, while plying her for information on Ray’s whereabouts, a strikingly effective motivational speech. The climactic conclusion of the story is remarkably unpredictable given the beginning of the book but also formulaically delivered, so it is both imaginative and disappointing simultaneously. Faith’s propulsion out of ennui, though, is irresistibly endearing and manages to avoid even a hint of maudlin sentimentality. Unfortunately, the volume desperately needs a thorough copy edit, and its numerous errors (for example, “Of course it can ruin you life”) could be distracting to the reader. Still, Reed’s debut is an auspicious one, and Faith is a memorable, if peculiar, novelistic lead.
An unconventional and enthralling tale of a personal awakening.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2016
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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