Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

Next book

Love-40

A rambling but evocative family saga of two gifted tennis stars and their families.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

A debut novel about the powerful role that tennis plays in the lives of two young men.

Roland Louis “Louie” Mouton Jr., the son of a dynamic, charismatic doctor in Lafayette, Louisiana, narrates this sports tale. His father, a die-hard tennis fanatic, is the proprietor of the Roland Louis Mouton Lawn Tennis Court who has always dreamed of someday shepherding a world-class player to fame and fortune; Louie’s future in the sport was curtailed by a rotator cuff injury suffered during his college years, so his father’s energies turned to Rene “Train” Pierre Lacroix, a young man from a broken home who took to the sport of tennis with both determination and an eerie amount of natural ability. Louie’s narration parallels Train’s story with that of Marcel Jackson, another young tennis natural, whose upbringing was less traumatic and more varied than Train’s, which gave them different approaches to the game: “The most important thing that Train had that Marcel didn’t,” observes Louie, “was a killer instinct, the desire to completely destroy the opponent, the desire to brutalize the opponent, the desire to win at all costs.” The story follows these two characters’ lives on and off the court, through professional challenges and twists and turns in their personal lives, and Cauthen interweaves a good deal of information regarding the history and lore of tennis into this dual narrative. The story is also very effectively redolent of the South, steeped in descriptions of its foods and music and its rhythm of everyday life. The interplay of tragedy and triumph in the lives of its characters—such as guilt over a death or complications from health emergencies—is uniformly well done. The novel suffers a bit from the open-endedness that afflicts many other sports-oriented stories (characters come and go, but the game goes on), but readers—and especially tennis fans—will find it gripping.

A rambling but evocative family saga of two gifted tennis stars and their families.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: BookLogix

Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2017

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 231


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 231


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • New York Times Bestseller

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

Next book

THE NIGHTINGALE

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

Close Quickview