A pleasant, quiet tale about the gradual improvements in a young man’s life.
A wayward young man discovers a new identity working for a wealthy mentor in this debut coming-of-age novel.
Winston Thibodeau James—who, for obvious reasons, prefers to go by Ted—wants to get out of his small Midwestern town. His mom split two years ago, and now the 18-year-old youth lives with his alcoholic father, works at Taco Bell, and pals around with two of the local hoodlums. At the pair’s urging, Ted plans to rob widower Jack Kelley, but when he arrives at the house and finds the man passed out on the floor, he calls an ambulance instead. As a means of thanks—and of giving Ted something to do—Jack’s lawyer daughter offers to pay the teen to live with the rich older man, who is suffering from dementia. In exchange, Ted agrees to enroll at the local junior college on Jack’s dime. As Ted tries to keep his willful new charge on his doctor-approved diet, Jack attempts to mentor the young man and even to set him up with Maureen Rittenhouse, a beautiful friend of the family. With these positive influences, Ted suddenly has a supportive community, and the problems in his life—like his father’s alcoholism—suddenly feel more solvable. But will Ted’s new life as Jack’s helper be enough to convince him to stay in town? Wilcox’s prose is simple and declarative, as here where Ted’s mother and her new husband come back to town: “At a little after nine on Friday night, Hank Karl and Marie James arrived at the Holiday Inn Express. They checked in and put their things in their room. Then walked across the street to the Waffle House. There they had a light dinner. Both had a two-egg breakfast with crispy bacon.” The plot tracks Ted’s development from a listless adolescent to a young man of purpose, and it does so in a largely undramatic fashion. The problems, when they arise, are sorted out pretty quickly, and characters are eager to make peace and help out one another. The tale is as wholesome as it is unlikely, but the story moves along at a good clip and the characters, for all their Leave It to Beaverearnestness, are oddly endearing.
A pleasant, quiet tale about the gradual improvements in a young man’s life.Pub Date: April 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-578-36004-1
Page Count: 341
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2022
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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