Beautiful language, delightful storytelling and a fully imagined world make this return trip to Oh worth the ride.
Award-winning author Siciarz (Left at the Mango Tree, 2013) returns to the fictional island of Oh for a fresh mystery in this witty companion to her debut novel.
When the tropical island of Oh gets quiet, that can’t be good. Oh’s lone newspaperman, Bruce, has no news to report besides the occasional rainbow, until an anonymous personal ad is placed in the newspaper, sending the citizens—including Trevor the baker, Branson the teacher—into a frenzy of speculation. Raoul, the mystery-loving customs agent, wants no part in Oh’s gossip, but when a mysterious message appears on the side of his house, he has no choice but to become involved. A mangled bicycle and a missing woman add to the drama, and the bumbling police officers Arnold and Joshua begin to concoct a case that Oh’s newspaper laps up. When fisherman Madison Fuller is accused of murdering the missing woman, his sister, May Fuller, scrambles to clear his name. High jinks and gossip abound as everyone adds to the story of the crime, and more messages painted on Raoul’s home urge him to investigate what others on Oh are not. He’s led to Mrs. Jaymes, house help to the late Capt. Dagmore. Dagmore’s origin story becomes a novella within a novella, and several chapters pass with Raoul trying to pull pertinent information from Mrs. Jaymes’ memory. If Raoul is frustrated by Mrs. Jaymes’ long tangents, readers will also be irked as the story rambles along, piling more characters from Dagmore’s life on top of the mystery at hand. Yet as Oh prepares for its first courtroom trial, Raoul learns what he needs to know, and with a flourish, he’s able to provide the final piece of the puzzle. The flavor and wit that decorated Oh the first time around are still present in this sequel, with snappy dialogue, well-timed plot twists and Siciarz’s lyrical sentences. Dagmore’s meandering origin story sometimes deters from the immediacy of the mystery, and his multiple names (e.g., Quick, Bowles) can be a bit confusing. The novel’s big reveal isn’t a huge departure from Left At The Mango Tree, as family secrets and heritage again hold the keys to Raoul’s burning questions. Nevertheless, it’s an island tale as charming and whimsical as Siciarz’s first.
Beautiful language, delightful storytelling and a fully imagined world make this return trip to Oh worth the ride.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 369
Publisher: Pink Moon Press
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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