by Ted Bernard ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2018
A passionately cautionary eco-tainment tale that cross-pollinates an impressive garden of genres.
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Students and faculty at a rural Ohio college unite against an underhanded industrial mining scheme on protected land—unaware that a larger catastrophe looms.
In this novel, Gilligan University is an enclave of multicultural, progressive thought in Appalachian southern Ohio (those cognizant of the region will recognize a disguised Ohio University). Katja Nickleby was a globe-trotting academic whose posthumously published manuscript Over the Cliff became a 21st-century Silent Spring of climate change. By 2014, her protégé (and former lover), Stefan Friemanis, is a professor at Gilligan, smitten with a female student despite the taboos of such an affair. Meanwhile, another student discovers a dirty scheme by uncouth energy tycoon Jasper Morse to secure mining rights to a small but cherished old-growth forest deeded to the college—despite Gilligan’s vow to embrace “sustainability,” not fossil fuels. DIY investigations by Stefan’s undergraduate friends find vast, Koch brothers–like fortunes hidden offshore by Morse, tentacles of corruption reaching from a Gilligan administrator to the Ohio governor, and a Mafia-like cabal of Cleveland Greek Cypriots (Buckeye State shoutouts, even absurdist ones like that, abound). As events escalate to “monkey wrenching” sabotage and campus riots, the tale unfolds not only via Stefan’s journals, but also through the eyes of Hannah McGibbon, an erstwhile student now looking back from the 2030s—the drastically changed era forecast by Katja (remember her?). Bernard (Hope and Hard Times, 2010) wields a wise and skillful voice in this intricate eco-fiction, even as the narrative goes through more metamorphoses (international thriller, college-town dramedy, dystopian/sci-fi prophecy) than the volatile weather in the wounded world he invokes. Even with one climax on a literal dark and stormy night, the author’s erudite but never dry scholarly voice smooths the rough patches, including a finale/epilogue that’s like another book altogether (one of those many post-apocalypse cautionary yarns at that). Helpful essay inserts, footnotes, endnotes, and even charts and graphs present Bernard’s inconvenient truths.
A passionately cautionary eco-tainment tale that cross-pollinates an impressive garden of genres.Pub Date: April 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-927032-84-8
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Petra Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ted Bernard illustrated by Alexa Miller
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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