A sometimes-problematic story that relies too heavily on its protagonist’s supposed flawlessness.
A young woman begins a modeling career to escape from her hometown in Zahr’s novel.
Rimahas been training to be a concert pianist ever since she received a piano for her 12th birthday. She loves making music, but her ultimate goal is to get out of her Russian hometown of Kursk and make a life for herself in the West. While vacationing on a cruise ship, she’s discovered by a modeling scout who’s taken with her beauty. Rima feels conflicted at first but eventually sees that modeling might be her ticket out of Russia. While temporarily living in Moscow before a modeling job, she meets an American named Alexander Loft, for whom she develops romantic feelings. As she becomes prominent in her field, she continues to think about what she really wants out of life. Zahr is a proficient writer, and her prose is often well crafted. However, the story that she tells isn’t particularly exciting. As a protagonist, Rima is a bit too perfect to be fully engaging: She’s a skilled musician who’s breathtakingly beautiful and becomes successful at modeling with relatively little effort. The overall plot has very low stakes aside from one questionable point of conflict that many readers will find offensive: Alexander has been intimate with a man in the past, and he’s seeing a therapist as a result, spurred by Rima’s assumption that he’s somehow confused about his sexual orientation. Alexander learns that he’s bisexual, but when he eventually gets a boyfriend, the story troublingly paints his bisexuality as a stop on the way to being gay—and also notes that he only managed to love Rima because she was “so perfect.”
A sometimes-problematic story that relies too heavily on its protagonist’s supposed flawlessness.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-951933-80-7
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
Very slow off the mark, though once blackmail and murder enter the picture, Scottoline moves things along with her customary...
In Scottoline’s latest family-centered thriller (Accused, 2013, etc.), Jake Buckman lets son Ryan drive the family car on a back road. Very bad idea.
The car hits someone, and she’s dead. Faced with the prospect of his teenager’s life being ruined, Jake tells him to get back in the car, and they drive away. “[D]on’t tell Mom,” Jake warns; he loves his wife, but Pam has the personality you’d expect of a superior court judge (judgmental), and their marriage is still recovering from Jake’s decision to start his own business, which has made him a mostly absentee husband and father. He’s now “one of the top-ten ranked financial planners in southeastern Pennsylvania,” though his planning skills aren’t evident as Jake ineptly tries to cover their tracks. He also has a terrible time keeping his son from confessing once they learn that the dead girl is Ryan’s high school classmate Kathleen Lindstrom. It takes more than 100 pages for the plot to involve anything other than Jake’s nerves, Pam’s suspicions and Ryan’s guilty wails, all of which are believable but not very interesting. Sleazy blackmailer Lewis Deaner livens things up, especially after he turns up murdered. If the police find those cellphone pictures Deaner had of Jake and Ryan at the scene of the crime, Jake will be a suspect. And once Ryan has blurted out the truth to his mother, furious Pam might be just as happy to see Jake in jail. The killer’s identity isn’t much of a surprise, since he’s the only character with any individual traits apart from the Buckmans and the cops, but the final twist comes out of nowhere, 10 pages from the end.
Very slow off the mark, though once blackmail and murder enter the picture, Scottoline moves things along with her customary professionalism, if scant credibility.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-01009-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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