Fun but flimsy.
An aging anthropologist blurs the line between obsession and research in Richmond’s character study–cum-murder mystery.
When 25-year-old Alice Salmon, a promising young reporter with a party-girl streak, is found dead in a frozen Southampton canal after a night drinking with friends, it seems like an tragic accident, a raucous evening gone horribly awry. But to professor Jeremy Cooke, his former student is no ordinary victim, and in her death, he sees his next project—and his own chance at redemption. By collecting the fragments she left behind—the text messages and emails, the news articles and diary entries—he will do more than make sense of her death. He will revive her. “Might it be possible,” he wonders, “to reconstruct a life out of such fragments? To reassemble a person, piece them back together from such soluble shards?” But if one half of the resulting opus belongs to Alice, the journals and tweets and Spotify playlists adding up to a kind of coming-of-age story, then the other half—the mystery half—belongs to Jeremy himself. In letters to his childhood pen pal, he theorizes, opines, speculates, and self-flagellates, piecing together what happened to Alice while coming to terms with fragments of his own history. It’s a clever device: Jeremy’s letters are part of the Alice-ephemera, but they’re also the glue that holds it together. But despite the many details that ought to add up to psychological nuance, Jeremy never quite transcends pompous professorial clichés, and his overwrought narration begins to grate. The novel’s suspense may lie in Jeremy’s letters, but the book is most alive (ironically) when it’s with Alice, and the details of her life trump the ultimately hollow intrigue of her death.
Fun but flimsy.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7384-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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