A bit heavy on wish fulfillment, this vivid novel is still a satisfying read.
A South Carolina woman dreams of moving to New York City in this debut novel.
Edwards’ (Some Favors, 2011) story introduces readers to the heroine, Nadine Carter Barnwell, born to a good family in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, where all is not well. Her autocratic father, Sam, has become even more so since Nadine’s mother died. Close to college graduation, Nadine is determined to head to New York and fulfill her dream of becoming a successful modern dancer. This is bad enough in Sam’s practical view, but she plans to arrive there with her boyfriend, Frank Prescott, an aspiring actor. Thankfully, Nadine’s Aunt Amelia, a wise earth-mother type, runs interference and counsels Nadine to follow her heart. Then Frank gets a small movie role, his big break, and leaves, promising to return. Meanwhile, Nadine has become pregnant with Frank’s child, but the baby is stillborn and only Nadine, Aunt Amelia, and Uncle Hamp know of this chapter in her life. Nadine finally moves to New York, accompanied by her dancer friend Deni Hansen. Babes in the woods, they escape many unsavory and even dangerous characters but eventually life improves. One of Nadine’s guides is Father Benjamin Vincent Dunlap, a paraplegic gay priest—she is never without wise counsel. She winds up in the world of the theater and meets, and marries, Colin Bennett, a successful director. They have a loft in SoHo. Life is good. Then comes a letter that threatens to smash their comfortable existence to smithereens. There follows an audacious plot resolution, but the reader should be spellbound as it unfolds. Then the expected denouement wraps things up nicely, or almost. Edwards writes superbly and the plot moves briskly. The narrative offers evocative descriptions of both the historic Lowcountry (“From the marsh, an egret fluttered its wings in slow motion and lifted into the air. The smaller birds, smartly tucked in the shade of the palmettos, called out to whoever listened”) and glamorous New York (“Sometimes the city just popped out of the darkness like a 3-D movie. From this vantage point, Manhattan looked like a fairyland, the place Dorothy and her friends were searching for”). And there are juicy subplots, such as Deni’s fall and redemption. What starts out as chick lit turns delightfully surprising.
A bit heavy on wish fulfillment, this vivid novel is still a satisfying read.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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