by Steve Yarbrough ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2018
Despite his book's depiction of dark realities—the guilt and despair of the characters’ interior lives is matched by...
Despite graphic deaths and a variety of police cases, Yarbrough’s 11th work of fiction (The Realm of Last Chances, 2013, etc.) is less a murder mystery than an exploration of how abruptly lives can go off the rails.
In 2006, Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Brennan is spending Christmas with his adored wife, Julia, and daughter, Anna, in Julia’s native Krakow. If the opening scene of domestic happiness, tree-trimming in a cozy apartment, feels too perfect to last, it is. A car accident kills Anna and Julia. Trapped in the passenger seat, Richard is sure he will never forget the face of the other driver, who glances into their car before fleeing the scene. That driver, never identified by the police, is Bogdan Baranowski, who's rushing to the hospital. A German shepherd has mauled his friend Marek as they made a botched robbery attempt, an act of desperation by men facing ruin in post-communist Poland. Over the novel’s 10-year span, Bogdan and Richard struggle separately to come to terms with what happened that night. Richard allows himself to become stunted by his grief. After helping another reporter cover the murder/suicide of a couple and their three children—a tragedy that, like the car crash, combines an accident of bad timing with bad decision-making—Richard realizes he’s lost his ambition as a serious journalist. Meanwhile, Bogdan drinks to excess and loses his job. His wife leaves him. He takes the rap for a minor crime and spends a year in prison to expiate his guilt over the Brennan deaths. But Bogdan’s potential goodness will have readers rooting for him. Actually, readers will root for all the novel’s tenderly drawn, flawed characters.
Despite his book's depiction of dark realities—the guilt and despair of the characters’ interior lives is matched by political turmoil in both the U.S. and Eastern Europe—Yarbrough’s pensively hopeful view of people’ capacity to endure, even prosper, shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60953-143-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Share your opinion of this book
More by Steve Yarbrough
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
Share your opinion of this book
More by Donna Tartt
BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt
BOOK REVIEW
by Donna Tartt
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
Share your opinion of this book
More by John Steinbeck
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
More About This Book
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.