In a departure from her mystery novels, Baker uses her knowledge of the law to compellingly depict a riveting custody battle.
In Baker’s (Death of a Prince, 2013, etc.) novel, Marian Reid is a mother determined to gain custody of her autistic son—40 years later.
Marian has secrets, but until her 40th high school reunion, most of those secrets had stayed hidden. She’s the owner of Reid’s Ritzy Rags, a secondhand clothing store in Galveston, Texas, on Ledbetter Street. The store owners on Ledbetter Street are like a family: Eva, who owns Coffee & More across the street, is Marian’s best friend and confidante. Just as Marian and her high school boyfriend, Bryan Mosley, reconnect, her life gets more complicated. Unbeknownst to Bryan, the reason Marian left town the summer before senior year was to have their baby, Robert. Marian’s mother forced her to give him up for adoption. Later, Robert was discovered to have autism and thrust into foster care. Dorothy, Robert’s foster mother and guardian, allowed Marian to visit Robert and build a relationship with him over the years. The courts deemed Dorothy a good caretaker for Robert, but when she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Marian must enter into her third custody battle for Robert, now 40 years old. Thanks to Marian’s mother, all of Marian’s past struggles are brought to light during the hearing. But Marian, knowing she understands his needs, is determined to get custody of her son. Baker, a judge, draws from her knowledge of the law as she has in her previous novels but this time moves away from the mystery genre. When Marian can’t rely on her mother or even her old boyfriend, she learns she can rely on the people of Ledbetter Street to support and sustain her. Although Marian is caught up in her own courtroom drama, she takes time to help a young battered woman. Baker introduces the many characters of Ledbetter Street, painting a picture of Galveston’s community of artists and business owners as well as the homeless and downtrodden—a welcome layer to the story despite an already full plot. Those many plot threads cause the book to feel a bit bloated, which distracts from its heartwarming message. Still, punchy writing and a colorful cast of characters rescue the novel.
In a departure from her mystery novels, Baker uses her knowledge of the law to compellingly depict a riveting custody battle.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 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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