Shrewdly commercial and seamed with some memorable descriptions of the polar wilds, Lupton’s latest, though unsteady at...
Can an intrepid mother and her plucky deaf daughter survive a perilous ride across a midnight polar landscape to find the missing-presumed-dead third member of their family?
Threats accumulate more thickly than snowflakes in the arctic blizzard through which guilty yet resourceful mother Yasmin Alfredson must drive, in this third novel from British suspense author Lupton (Afterwards, 2012, etc.). The strongly visual story hits the ground running as Yasmin and her 10-year-old daughter, Ruby, having just arrived on a flight from England to Fairbanks, Alaska, are told that a fire has killed everyone at Anaktue, the tiny village where Yasmin’s husband/Ruby’s father, Matt, was based while researching a wildlife documentary. Although the police have found Matt’s wedding ring at the site, Yasmin refuses to accept his death and, since the authorities have stopped looking, resolves to find him herself. What follows is a woman-and-daughter-in-peril scenario verging at times on the superhuman as Yasmin ends up driving a vast truck across Alaska, through terrifying terrain and weather conditions, pursued—not unlike in the 1971 Steven Spielberg movie Duel—by faceless foes. While this journey is paced like a bullet, Lupton layers on multiple additional dangers: creepy eco-warriors; avalanches; scary anonymous emails of pictures of dead animals; scruple-free energy companies; wolves; and more. The narrative point of view is split between Yasmin, repenting of her shortcomings toward both Matt and Ruby, and the spunky child, assisted by her Voice Magic laptop. However, a late shift in focus saps some of the story’s powerful intimacy, substituting skimpier narration and worthier themes. Lupton is at her best when describing the dark, wintry wilderness and pitting her two female protagonists against all comers.
Shrewdly commercial and seamed with some memorable descriptions of the polar wilds, Lupton’s latest, though unsteady at times, delivers an engrossing wallop of readable escapism.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90367-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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