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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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