A rollicking, if occasionally foggy, adventure through time and memory.
Stosny (Henry-Henry, Shadows & Light, 2016, etc.) offers a story about an author’s connections to the past and President John F. Kennedy.
The protagonist of this jumpy novel is a white man, George, who falls in love with and marries an African-American woman, Madeline, in the late 1950s. One day, while driving, George explains to Madeline why he loves her, and, due to his distraction, the two crash into a Budweiser truck. The accident tragically leaves Madeline in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, and they wind up receiving a tidy legal settlement from the beer company. Afterward, George refuses to get a full-time job, although he remains dutiful to his wife. With the settlement money, he’s free to pursue his personal obsession: an ever expanding novel called Primordial Swamps. When Madeline advises him to make the book shorter, he says, “The story can’t be cut, it’s about everything.” As he works on his novel, he also becomes fixated on President Kennedy and his assassination. The book bounces between various time periods, including 1963 and 2033, encompassing George’s novel, George’s reality, and the tale of a curious doctor in 1963 who would like to see the 35th president killed. The story moves and changes quickly, and, as such, its ideas come at a rapid pace. For example, iron lungs, the Cuban missile crisis, and Kennedy’s infidelities are all considered in quick succession, giving readers digestible tidbits of history without ever exhausting their attention and interest. The book also offers this slim but potent observation on first lady Jacqueline Kennedy: “She brought elegance to a country in need of fantasy.” Some of the more fictionalized material doesn’t always flow as smoothly; George’s immediate family is strange but not very memorable, and when his relations meet unfortunate endings, one may be more likely to shrug than to gasp. The story is much more engaging, however, when focused on the protagonist himself and his odd struggles, which provide a unique view on events of the past.
A rollicking, if occasionally foggy, adventure through time and memory.Pub Date: April 26, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 321
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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