A touching, absorbing story of a vulnerable person confronting obstacles on her journey toward pride and self-reliance.
A young woman with a traumatic brain injury moves forward with the help of a diverse collection of friends in Imhoff’s (Painted Wings, 2015, etc.) latest novel.
Kim “Flicker” Frechette was only a teenager when a drunk driver smashed into her car and derailed her life. Now she’s in her early 20s and chafing at the confines of the group home that she shares with two other girls, Lori and Beth. She’s still slowly recovering from brain damage from the accident, and she processes information more slowly than most other people do. However, she resists when people put her in the same category as her developmentally disabled housemates: “I wasn’t born like this,” she thinks. “I used to be smart.” As she explores the thrills and trepidations of her increasing independence, she begins to understand that making adult decisions isn’t easy. Fortunately, she has a group of concerned friends to help her negotiate the transition: Katie Martin, who runs the local bookstore, and her partner, Annie Curtis (whose story is told in Imhoff’s previous novel); and short-order cook Jesse Davis, an ex-schoolteacher with his own traumatic past. Together, these mentors watch out for Flicker, particularly when her choices lead her into potential danger. Imhoff ties his protagonist’s somewhat delayed coming-of-age story to more serious issues of date rape, domestic abuse, sex trafficking, and the long-term effects of brain trauma, and the resulting narrative is both educational and suspenseful. Flicker is an engaging character as she gradually learns which people to trust and which to avoid and as she grows to appreciate the innocent kindness of Lori and Beth rather than distancing herself from them. That said, the narration sometimes feels like a didactic educational pamphlet about traumatic brain injury, and the characterizations are sometimes simplistic. For example, Flicker’s boyfriend is so one-dimensional that it’s hard to understand what draws her to him, and her friends seem almost too good to be true. Still, readers won’t be able to help cheering Flicker’s triumph over those who seek to take advantage of her.
A touching, absorbing story of a vulnerable person confronting obstacles on her journey toward pride and self-reliance.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Cedar Lake Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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