An often moving story of recovery and rebirth, but one that’s weighed down by excessive detail and dialogue.
A survivor of a traumatic brain injury traces the path of a woman’s life before and after an accident in Xiao’s debut novel.
Mary, 39, is idling in the midst of a drawn-out divorce in California’s Silicon Valley. She’s interested in a film career, and she takes it as a sign when a teacher tells her it doesn’t matter what you know in Hollywood but “who you know.” After she’s reminded of a friend who’d dreamed of making a film but never did so, she finds a connection in Los Angeles to help her. After she moves to LA, she’s set up with a man named Mike. The two quickly fall into a romance, but it isn’t long before it sours: the strong-willed, reckless Mike breaks up with her at Disney World but still pursues her, even after stating that he wants to see other people. His actions later cause a life-defining change; he crashes his car while driving them home from the Renaissance Faire, and Mary sustains a traumatic brain injury. Afterward, she’s plagued by double vision, short-term memory loss, and numbness on her left side. Once released from the hospital, Mike takes sexual advantage of her and then kicks her out. Her new life is filled with PTSD-fueled fantasies of vengeance against Mike, dulled only by visions of angels who swoop in to soothe her. It takes her years to recover, but she eventually begins the journey toward making a film about her life. Xiao offers an uplifting and overwhelmingly comprehensive narrative of Mary’s accident and its aftermath, often told in long passages of uninterrupted conversation. Mike and Mary, in particular, read as complex and real. However, the book’s overreliance on dialogue renders other characters flat; a tighter focus on plot would have lended it much-needed tension. As is, the story meanders until the car accident radically shifts the pace halfway through the novel. After that point, though, the author effectively shows how Mary’s resilience and bright spirit allow for an inspiring, battle-born woman to emerge.
An often moving story of recovery and rebirth, but one that’s weighed down by excessive detail and dialogue.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 222
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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