Still, the reader will be forgiven for wondering what the point might be, other than that life is unfair, confusing and...
A novel of Los Angeles tormented by racial tension and gang violence in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict.
Readers who were alive and aware then will remember the news footage from Southern California when, on April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted two police officers of using excessive force—though clearly King, an African-American, had been beaten. Novelist and street artist Gattis (Kung Fu High School, 2005, etc.) takes the rising post-verdict mayhem as backdrop for a series of linked, episodic stories in which Chicano gangsters, Anglo emergency responders, Korean vigilantes and members of just about every other ethnic group in melting-pot LA share the stage. As the book opens, a young food server remarks that he and a fellow worker, arriving at a catering site, “saw smoke, four black towers going up like burning oil wells in Kuwait. Maybe not that big, but big.” The violence soon sweeps young Ernesto up, as it does his co-worker, who bears, among other sobriquets, the resonant nom de guerre Termite. The latter lad aspires to something better, and he can be downright philosophical: “All of us are just some fucked-up little smart kids born in the wrong places….I mean, we’re not all smart. Some of us are just fucked-up or drugged out, but we do get fixated on shit.” Check. Gattis does a good job of rounding out and differentiating the 17 or so major players who figure in his pages, some phony confident and some Hamlet-like in their uncertainty (“we are technically vigilantes, and I don’t know how I feel about that”), and there are lashings of pyrotechnic violence and flowing adrenalin to keep the story moving.
Still, the reader will be forgiven for wondering what the point might be, other than that life is unfair, confusing and often ugly—and for that, we have the film Magnolia. Competent but not especially memorable.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237879-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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