A perceptive novel with a strong teenage hero by a promising new novelist.
Welcome to a high school that Holden Caulfield, for all his angst, would not recognize.
In his debut novel, Brillon describes all the types lurking in the hallways of a high school: the superannuated and sclerotic, the burnout, the sacrificial newbie, the schlub of a security guard, the bullies, the jocks, the nerds, and the goths. They are all here. The protagonist is freshman Bayard Bitter (yes, Bitter), who lives with his disabled father. Bayard is a good kid even if he is always getting into fights to defend someone else. But since he inevitably throws the first punch, he gets blamed. After he clashes with Kyle Merchant, a fellow student, an English teacher named Mr. D. tells Bayard: “I realize that high-school can generally be an awful place. It’s filled with gossip and meanness and great, great stupidity. But you know what?...Eventually it ends.” Often Bayard is defending his nerdy middle school friend Abbott Bishop. Then there are the girls. Bayard is smitten with Lee Milner, from middle school, who has grown up to be a confused tease and a taunt. At one point, he spies Sarah, a casual friend, canoodling with Mr. D. She will later seek Bayard’s help. Finally, he falls in with Nona, a goth girl who cannot hide her sadness beneath her cynicism. (Some of the best scenes transpire in the goth underworld.) The book’s intense climax, ripped from the headlines, involves the forever bullied Abbott. While this is his first book, Brillon, a high school English teacher, has obviously been practicing his craft for quite some time. The dialogue rings true, and the sense of high school anguish is all-pervasive. And in the midst of all this palpable misery, it is easy to lose sight of a simple fact: Bayard, just a normal kid, still anchors all the craziness that swirls around him. He is more of a hero than he knows. There is a little of Holden Caulfield in Bayard.
A perceptive novel with a strong teenage hero by a promising new novelist.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 358
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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