A formulaic tale about the dangers of temptation.
A mother beleaguered by stress—and frustrated aspirations—risks it all for an illicit affair in this debut novel.
Alexandra Hoffman’s life is a hectic one. She has three rambunctious kids, one of whom, Ryan, struggles with severe anxiety and attention deficit disorder, and likely falls somewhere on the autism spectrum. Her husband, Jason, is consumed by his corporate job, and his absenteeism has taken a toll on their marriage. Alex’s 40th birthday is fast approaching, and she’s dispirited by unrealized ambitions—she planned to become a novelist and now keeps an anonymous blog detailing her travails as a full-time mom (“Yesterday, I stopped by the Back-to-School Parent Breakfast and made myself a tall cup of Starbucks and shoved a pre-made egg sandwich on seven-grain bread into the pocket of my jacket and left. I didn’t stay for sign-in or icebreakers or speeches”). She looks up an old flame, Matt Daniels, with whom she had an intense romantic affair—they lived together for a year in London. She accidentally friends him on Facebook and, against her better judgment, meets him for dinner. Against anyone’s better judgment, she returns to his hotel room for a glass of water, and they are both overcome by the magnetic draw of their attraction to each other. A torrid affair begins. Finn jumps among the first-person narrative, snippets from Alex’s blog, and flashbacks to her youthful romance with Matt. The author realistically sketches a portrait of a haggard mother, pummeled by relentless obligations and unceremoniously jettisoned dreams. In addition, her account of Ryan’s tribulations as a teen addled with cognitive dysfunction is expertly produced. But the story is at best a familiar one, and maybe shopworn, a problem worsened by the weight of clichés. Consider Alex’s description of her life coach, Lark: “Her dark purple top, purple yoga pants, and tattooed arm lent her the aura of some kind of modern-day shaman.” The pace of the tale is lumbering, and one of its driving premises—that Alex could be a great writer if only she’d believe in herself—is never evidenced by any of the samples shared with the reader, which are unspectacular even by the standards of the blogosphere. While Alex’s frustration is expressively detailed by Finn, the plot is too stale to grip the reader’s attention for long, and the characters too threadbare.
A formulaic tale about the dangers of temptation.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Inkspell Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2017
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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