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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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