Tender, witty, and articulate with a satisfying conclusion; should appeal to readers who never tire of one more dog tale.
In this debut autobiographical novel, a man pays tribute to the many canines that have enriched his life.
Although the book’s narrator doesn’t actually remember the stray black-and-white dog his grandparents took in when he was a child, the family story about his relationship with the pup named Pete previews what would become a lifelong connection to a delightful assortment of canines. The narrator’s mom found the pair lying side by side on the living room rug: “Pete was chewing one of my wood toys to splinters. I was gnawing on one of his old bones.” Now, decades later, the narrator walks to a park with Pippa and Pershing (two of his three current dogs) and ruminates about canines and the changes he has witnessed across the decades. Expecting two important calls during this walk, he muses: “I was struck by how new it all was. Grandparents with one phone, parents with extensions upstairs and down, and me with one I carried in my pocket.” When the narrator left for college, it was the beginning of 15 dogless years, which included “marriage, fatherhood, divorce and visitation.” Then he met Darcy and her dog, Albert: “He looked like the floor part of a push broom.” Eventually, the narrator and Darcy married, and their life together has been filled with canines ever since. At Darcy’s instigation, they began showing Parker, the third member of their current pack. Tankersley (a pen name) informs readers in an author’s note that “the people he writes about are fictional” but “the dogs are not.” Good-humored, conversational prose makes this book a quick, enjoyable read: One breeder “had a ‘how can I help’ you pleasantness like a Siri or Cortina of today” but with a “human undertone of ‘what do you really need?’ ” Yet one section dealing with the Irish derivation of a pup’s name, Grainne, runs on a bit too long. Still, there is an inevitable poignancy sprinkled throughout the novel each time the narrator recalls a beloved companion taking that final trip to the veterinarian. But he doesn’t linger long on those episodes in this lighthearted story. He quickly moves on to the next canine acquisition.
Tender, witty, and articulate with a satisfying conclusion; should appeal to readers who never tire of one more dog tale.Pub Date: June 17, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 50
Publisher: Little Creek Press
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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