A rousing Canadian comeback story incited by love that focuses too heavily on sports and not enough on family.
An ex-goalie must take up his hockey stick and glove once more when his son is badly injured in this debut novel.
At age 20, Mariano Giovanelli has it all; the star goalie for the Vancouver Canucks is one of the most celebrated players in the NHL, with a beautiful wife and a baby son on the way. But when his wife, Angie, dies in childbirth, Mariano gives it all up to raise little Michael, with only the help of his loving mother, Mary. Fast-forward 17 years, and Michael is now an impressive hockey player himself, spurred on by his supportive father. The young athlete gets a glimpse of the big time when he competes against some NHL veterans. Unfortunately, a hard hip check from one of those players sends Michael and his dreams crashing onto the ice, causing a traumatic brain injury that devastates Mariano and taxes his finances. At the urging of his mother, some unexpected religious intervention, and maybe even his dead wife, the ex-keeper is convinced to return to the sport he loves to make money to support his son’s recovery. But the once-great rookie is years out of shape and will have to undergo intense training to try to become what he once was, a trip that will take him to a camp in Chicago, the Toronto Marlies, and another chance in the NHL. Cain’s classic comeback story captures the action on the ice with a frenetic energy while portraying Mariano and his mother and son with a warmth that is often conveyed through their cooperation during good, old Italian cooking. The numerous training scenes are rarely tedious, and it’s a shame the book doesn’t extend this same attention to Michael’s recovery, as it would make a nice parallel to his father’s journey of rediscovery. Other moments, like Michael’s falling in love and finding his own path, are likewise given too little attention. The tale’s main conceit, the money needed for medical bills that spurs Mariano’s return to hockey, could be made more pressing. It would be another serious challenge for the keeper to overcome, along with his own self-doubts and the chiding of younger players.
A rousing Canadian comeback story incited by love that focuses too heavily on sports and not enough on family.Pub Date: March 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781662951879
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2024
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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