Clueless celebrities and criminal paparazzi provide the perfect match and the perfect metaphor for contemporary public...
Now that the Florida real-estate market has gone bust, the insatiable bottom-feeders circle a hilariously untalented starlet, everyone looking for a piece of her before she too crashes and burns.
Cherry Pye—or “the former Cheryl Bunterman,” as Hiaasen calls her—has been in the public eye for half of her 22 years. All that media exposure has taught her some valuable lessons. She knows that she has a natural right to have everyone else dance attendance on her; she knows how to score every drug on the planet and how to mix them with piquant results; and she’s even learning how to lip-synch the lyrics a less scarifying vocal artist has supplied for her second comeback album, Skantily Klad. Cherry’s circle of hangers-on can’t match her impervious innocence. Her botoxed twin publicists, Lucy and Lila Lark, are constantly cooking up new schemes without revealing them to her. Unbeknownst to her, her parents have long engaged savvy actress Ann DeLuisa to act as her “undercover stunt double,” circulating among her wide-eyed public when she’s indisposed, and decoying paparazzi like Bang Abbott, whose Pulitzer Prize is just a tad tarnished. Her pederast promoter Maury Lykes has hired her a new bodyguard, Chemo, whose ideas about cutting himself in for a bigger slice of the action are as inventive as his anatomy (his severed hand has been replaced by a prosthetic weedwhacker). When Bang, whose improbable mile-high hookup with Cherry has given him stratospheric dreams of his own, carjacks Ann out from under Chemo’s nose under the impression that she’s Cherry, and Ann begs Skink, the homeless ex–Florida governor who’s sweet on her, to come to her rescue, the plot may seem to be boiling over. In the hands of a master farceur like Hiaasen (Nature Girl, 2006, etc.), however, the major hijinks are just beginning.
Clueless celebrities and criminal paparazzi provide the perfect match and the perfect metaphor for contemporary public culture. And you never know which sentences are going to end with a back flip.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27258-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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