A country-hopping political novel that never finds its feet.
Political violence in the Philippines touches the life of a man in Canada in Araneta’s debut novel.
In Winnipeg, Manitoba, 56-year-old Filipino immigrant Dario Quitario, wracked with cancer and forgetful due to painkillers, is waiting to die. As his doctor prepares him for his assisted suicide, Dario’s mind drifts to his daughter, Angela. Not long before, in the Philippines, Angela was engaged to Ramon Reyes, a Harvard-educated lawyer and candidate for the office of vice mayor of Santo Cristo. Unfortunately, the sitting vice mayor, Paquito Gonzales—who wished to ascend to mayor and leave his previous office to his son—wasn’t about to let it go without a fight. “I’ve heard talk that Paquito protects drug lords,” Dario warned Ramon when the couple came to Canada for a visit. “He’s probably one of them. I don’t want to know where you stand on this problem of illegal drugs, for a very simple reason. If you condone it, you’ll be dying a slow death. If you fight it, you’ll be a dead man walking.” Dario, whose time in the Filipino military caused him to witness—and commit—acts of extrajudicial violence, knows of what he speaks. Ramon doesn’t heed Dario’s advice, however, and continues his grassroots campaign. Can an ailing Dario save his daughter and her fiance from the violence he once escaped? Araneta’s muscular prose captures the terseness of Dario’s world: “After a few seconds, Dario added, ‘we do what we need to do to stay alive.’ That was the closest that Ronnie would hear Dario mention any philosophy in life.” The book isn’t a traditional thriller—a good portion of it, set in Canada, chronicles Dario’s illness and his marriage to his much-younger wife, Barb. These more literary sections aren’t very compelling, however, nor are the Philippines sections all that thrilling. The characters have a lot of backstory, but the leisurely pace makes the book feel overlong, as a whole. Although many of the themes that Araneta raises are ambitious—corruption, the right to die—Dario, as a character, lacks the requisite complexity to bring them fully to life.
A country-hopping political novel that never finds its feet.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 312
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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