Hill’s grasp of history is more impressive than his hold on his characters.
Ancient and modern Greece meet in this ambitious, slow-paced story of an archaeological dig whose members have a hidden agenda.
Hill (The Love of Stones, 2001, etc.) uses as his viewpoint character a 25-year-old archaeologist. Ben Mercer, a postgraduate teacher/student, has spent the last seven years at Oxford. While there, the Englishman married foreign-born Emine; they had one child, Vanessa, before Emine divorced him. Ben still loves his ex-wife and daughter. Feeling like an abject failure he runs off to Greece with no clear goal and finds work at a meat grill in an Athens suburb. He hears of a dig outside Sparta and is hired to join a ragtag bunch of “shovelmonkeys” working for an American director. A core group of five appears to have a secret they refuse to share with their director or Ben. In this they are no different from the original Spartans, who thrived on secrecy while terrorizing their helots. We learn this from cogent academic notes interpolated through a narrative that constantly draws parallels. “We’re the real Spartans now,” says one shovelmonkey. Ben, whose greatest need is for camaraderie, feels increasingly frustrated, though he finds relief (rather too easily) in the arms of Japanese Natsuko. Readers will also be frustrated. The talented Hill is fizzing with ideas, but they’re only half-executed. Why doesn’t the collapse of Ben’s marriage get fuller treatment? Why is Max, the ringleader of a complicated scheme, kept in the background? The account of group dynamics meanders on until Ben is let into the club and learns the secret. It’s shocking but quite far-fetched and comes way too late. Just as disappointing, Ben gains no insight into the source of his recurrent anger; in the end, he’s still running from himself.
Hill’s grasp of history is more impressive than his hold on his characters.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-176825-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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