A tale of a filmmaker trying to make it in Los Angeles, obscured by an incoherent structure and style.
A young man tries to make his dreams come true during a strange stay in California.
An onslaught of disconnected imagery emerges in this debut novel’s first few pages: a hooded figure by a bus cries, “How did I get here?” An old man asks the narrator to write his biography; the mysterious name “Monroe Doe” makes a first appearance; the narrator suddenly receives congratulations for graduating from primary school. After this somewhat surreal beginning, Eton develops a story about a young man graduating at the top of his class and leaving his home—Nigeria—to pursue his goal of breaking into the film industry. Soon he arrives in Los Angeles, where old friends help get him acclimated to the city. He seeks out an attorney who had once visited his home, and during this quest meets a character named Dr. Army. The narrator also hears the name Monroe Doe from an unknown voice. This enigmatic name quickly becomes connected with a woman he films at a wedding and with whom he falls madly in love. The narrator begins to question his path as his obsession for the woman leads to a charge of stalking; a tragic death also leaves him reeling. He finds solace in poetry before another smattering of disconnected images concludes the story, in particular, a man repeating over and over, “This is a dead end; you’re still in the maze.” While the chaos Eton presents can feel like an avant-garde interpretation of Los Angeles, the work remains too disjointed to support any solid interpretations. Sentences such as “The bishop...had chronicled a testimony of riding on flat tires for miles, I mean regular tires” occur so often that the simplest plot elements become lost. Readers never learn whose story this is, how the narrator overcame having no access to money on his arrival, or even how a major character died—leaving them to feel that they are the ones trapped in a confusing and frustrating maze.
A tale of a filmmaker trying to make it in Los Angeles, obscured by an incoherent structure and style.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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