by Scott Devon ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
Entertaining, thought-provoking, and original.
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In this novel of the afterlife, an average Joe gets the chance to make things right with three figures from his past—and then things get strange.
As this unusual novel begins, Henry Ford (not the famous one) has just died of stomach cancer. Now that he’s dead, he begins considering his life, because—like his high school nickname, “Edsel”—this Ford failed to deliver. Although he succeeded in not repeating his alcoholic father’s worst sins, such as spousal abuse, he resembled his dad, Charlie, in other ways: by taking over his insurance-sales business, neglecting his own family, and drinking too much. Henry explores the afterlife in Purgatory and has visions that include mystifying numbers, symbols, and his mother telling him to avoid his father’s fate—the “second death” of banishment to hell. About one-third of the way through the novel, the narration abruptly shifts from first to third person as Henry meets Billy, the “Piano Man”; Henry remembers seeing him play in a nightclub in Pensacola, where he used to vacation. Billy explains that Henry can request to see three people from his life, with whom he hopes to make things right. The novel tells a not-unexpected story of redemption involving Henry’s relationships with wife, son, and daughter—but once it reaches that destination, it goes wildly off-road. Charlie gives Billy the second death, explaining that the Devil wants the Piano Man for his band; Henry is invited to celebrate Billy’s lost soul at an extravagant rock opera/wake in which Satan is the headliner; and Charlie reveals a plan to help his son escape hell via a deal with the King of Thieves. In his debut novel, Devon keeps up a colorful patter with frequent references to songs, movies, and other aspects of popular culture. Although Henry calls himself “ordinary,” he’s extraordinarily well-informed, making references to Buddhism’s Bodhi Tree, for example, or James Joyce’s Ulysses in this passage about his father: “Obscure and obscene, and born on a day in 1904 when the Joyce fella set his Dublin, novel….you see nothing but the dark night of a rotten soul entering the pale moon light to a whiter shade of hate.” At the same time, there’s nothing highbrow about how Henry’s daughter Elizabeth learns to love music—from hearing Elton John’s 1997 performance of “Candle in the Wind” at Princess Diana’s funeral. Some of the novel’s unexpected developments are fascinating, particularly the rock opera; Satan’s introduction, for instance, is rich with impresario cadences: “I bring you the long tongue liar, the midnight rider, the rambler, the gambler, the back biter! The one and only, the first victim that rose to be the King of Babylon, Lucifer the beautiful morning star, your deal maker, the one who knows your name, the Serpent Shaitan!” Although the progress of Henry’s soul becomes a little hard to follow in this heady atmosphere, the story somehow still manages to hang together.
Entertaining, thought-provoking, and original.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
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Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
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.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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