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The Toorak Jackpot

Name: The Toorak Jackpot
Author: Rosemary Macindoe

by Rosemary Macindoe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 8, 2016

Lighthearted and often delightfully surreal, this satire lacks a fully developed story.

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A debut farcical novel chronicles an Australian’s sudden ascent to fame and riches.

Bert Smith, an award-winning shoe salesman, largely lives an ordinary life. Despondent after his wife leaves him, he’s suddenly informed that he’s poised to receive a substantial inheritance from a mysterious benefactor. An attorney, Oswald Eggbottom, tells Bert that he’s been chosen, for reasons that remain unclear, to receive $10 million and an opulent palace in Toorak, one of the toniest neighborhoods in Melbourne. He’s also given a share of a generous portfolio of financial assets and access to a broker to manage his new holdings. But there’s a catch: he’s obligated to introduce himself to everyone he meets as a Toorak prince. Bert leaps at the opportunity, quits his job, and begins his life of royal leisure. Despite his overnight affluence, he’s determined to become even richer and aggressively sets his sights on reaching a net worth of a billion dollars. He briefly becomes a television celebrity—although his fame is largely a source of humiliation—and desperately pursues a romantic partner with whom to share his windfall. But Bert flounders without a sense of daily purpose and feels stung by his lonesomeness. He suffers from an addiction to alcohol and ends up jeopardizing his fortune through recklessness borne of avarice. Macindoe clearly intends this book to be a satire as evidenced by the plainly absurd and generally unexplained premise that underwrites the entire plot. Most of the short work is devoted to detailing Bert’s daily meanderings: he (inexplicably) saves a woman having a heart attack with CPR and then romantically pursues her beautiful daughter. The writing is simple, almost childlike, and the plot often seems constructed for a YA audience as a result. The author displays a penchant for whimsical inventiveness and ably creates a fablelike atmosphere. The novel also reads like a parable of sorts, but it’s never entirely clear what lesson the author means to impart. Macindoe fashions some raucously funny scenes but not enough to compensate for the paucity of narrative substance.

Lighthearted and often delightfully surreal, this satire lacks a fully developed story.

Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2016

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 190

Publisher: Australian eBook Publisher

Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.