A poignant assortment of stylistically daring stories.
A collection of short stories centered on the complications of love and the disorientation of grief.
Chehak (It’s Not About the Dog: Stories, 2015, etc.) isn’t cowed by the notion of tackling the most exigent existential issues in this assemblage of 16 tales, all but one previously published, mostly in literary magazines such as The Minnesota Review. Many of them confront the pain of loss. For example, in the first, titular piece, Nessa Lowe, a 60-year-old woman, struggles to get her bearings after her longtime husband abandons her for a younger woman—a fate that’s no less humiliating for being clichéd. Nessa contributes to her own solitude by alienating her other family members, as she’s an ungovernable alcoholic, inclined to mercurial acts of violence. Similarly, in “Helium,” Maudie’s spiritual desolation after the death of her husband reduces her to finding companionship in an artificial boy fashioned from balloons. As is characteristic of Chehak’s writing, the story manages to seamlessly weave despair with morbidly outlandish humor, as characters use the latter as a means to negotiate the former. In “Idiot,” a story that’s less than a page in length, an unnamed protagonist returns to her ex-boyfriend’s place to retrieve a pair of shoes only to hurl them into a lagoon shortly after—an act of self-redemption following a self-betraying submission. The author seems keen on flouting conventions; the story structures aren’t always linear, and many of them feel more like quick, impressionistic portraits of emotional states than they do literary chronicles of events. The concluding piece, “That is This: Resurrection,” resembles narrative verse with its series of short questions and declarative statements: “Is she dead? She is dead.” Chehak’s prose offers an impressive variety of styles, ranging from long, cascading sentences to linguistic parsimony, from short snapshots to longer, more plot-driven narratives. She has a talent for packing a lifetime of retrospection into one or two sentences, such as these, from “Coxswain”: “We ran through the streets, chanting for justice and an end to the war and peace on earth and love and he held my hand and I threw the rock that smashed the sign. There was darkness then and he kissed me then, he shattered me like glass.” Most of the pieces in this book are driven by character, and even the unnamed figures in them are powerfully drawn, if enigmatic. In “Suffer the Children: Four Quartets,” for instance, readers don’t know much information about Ellen—a woman in search of a new home, away from her mother—or about Mrs. Norton, the grifter posing as a house seller, but the mad desperation of both women is palpable. The author also sensitively juxtaposes personal anxiety with its global iteration; in “Apocalypse, Tonight,” the unnamed protagonist—her anonymity conspicuous in a story brimming with named characters—makes elaborate preparations for a New Year’s Eve party that could possibly include a Y2K catastrophe, but lurking in the background is the impending death of her father.
A poignant assortment of stylistically daring stories.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 95
Publisher: Foreverland Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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