A very impressive, engagingly written first novel.
A debut novel featuring a heroine with bipolar disorder, her tortured relationships, and the beautiful flora and fauna of Kenya.
Sarah and Peter, a wealthy, retired couple from California, have decided to treat themselves to a safari in Africa. At the last minute, however, they ditch an old-line travel company to instead go with the charismatic safari guide Max Einfield. However, during the safari, he’s nabbed for having expired papers and is detained at the notorious Nyayo House in Nairobi, controlled by imposing Kenyan functionaries. Most chapters begin with Sarah’s efforts to free Max and then flash back to the safari itself, which would have been idyllic except for the fact that Max took an inexplicable dislike to Sarah and that Peter was constantly needy, demanding, and irascible. Readers may find themselves fervently wishing that Sarah would strike back against both of them somehow, but she’s struggling with her own emotional problems, including a past suicide attempt, which allows the two men to bully her with impunity. The safari sights, however, prove to be spectacular, and Max does indeed know everything there is to know about animal behaviors. (He’s also a very charming man—except when he’s not.) The trio soon run across Brandon Howard, a world-famous nature photographer. He and Sarah hit it off immediately; clearly, they are soul mates. He pops up again and again during their travels, which is good for Sarah’s soul. Later, she stays on in Kenya by herself—a stay that stretches into weeks, with Sarah feeling increasingly happy and excited as the days go by. Finally, she’s convinced to return to California, where her trusted doctor diagnoses her with bipolar disorder. There’s much to admire in St. John’s debut novel. She has real insight into her characters as well as a wicked talent for turning a phrase: “She found herself trying to please a woman who appeared to bite off satisfaction from her children in tiny morsels, then, finding them unpalatable, spat them out”; “Her pen moves ahead, becoming a small sailing vessel carried along a course determined not by the captain, but by the wind.” At one point, she describes antelope on a road as “bucking at one another like notes of a song rising and then colliding.” More experienced writers would love to have such a gift. And her character sketches of Max and Peter are spot-on: Every little bullying comment from Max and every childish demand from Peter speak volumes about them as people. Sarah’s sadness is poignant and palpable, particularly when she realizes that all the money that she spread around so lavishly in her manic state—to Max, to Brandon, to assorted others—is truly gone for good. Readers may have one cavil, however; it’s not easy to exit a plot and end a book, and what the author does, in this case, may delight some but leave others incredulous. On balance, though, St. John is a promising writer to be encouraged.
A very impressive, engagingly written first novel.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63505-264-0
Page Count: 456
Publisher: MCP Books
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2018
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
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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