A pleasing comic novel with fatal stakes and a cynical edge.
Simon explores the unlikely effects of a cancer diagnosis in his darkly comedic debut novel.
Eliot Abrams is the chief marketing officer of De-Lish Chix, “the fifth largest franchise food operation on the planet.” When he meets people, he can accurately guess what cars they drive and how their offices are decorated. He has a beautiful wife, who runs her own business, and two young children. He has a golf handicap of 4. He never gets hangovers. When people meet him, they say things like, “You’re obviously a very smart man.” The only real problem in his life is that his job requires him to live in provincial Kansas City, Missouri. Oh, and that he’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Also—and this is just a smallish thing—he’s decided to murder his boss. With a probable death sentence hanging over his head and feeling ever less in control of his fate, Eliot attempts to reassert his own agency and go down swinging. As the oppressive clouds of his careerist lifestyle gather and darken, Eliot plots an act of liberation, learning that a proximity to death (his own or someone else’s) makes him feel alive in ways he’s never encountered before. Simon is a highly capable storyteller with a fluid sense of scene and a snarky sense of humor. He treats his plot and his characters with a refreshingly disdainful glee: this is not a story meant to tug on the reader’s heartstrings but to invite readers to fantasize about the sort of freedom that people normally forget they possess. Eliot is witty and humorously morose but not immediately likable: he’s arrogant, elitist, and self-centered. Yet this is what makes him an engaging character. He feels suitably real and therefore enticingly dangerous. Not that realism is Simon’s project. Drama and comedy are heightened just enough to make the novel a work of highly entertaining fancy. The book is longer than it needs to be, but questions about the lives that hang in the balance—along with Eliot’s quips —keep the reader turning pages to the end.
A pleasing comic novel with fatal stakes and a cynical edge.Pub Date: July 12, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 566
Publisher: 11 Barberry Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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