Bonvicini’s star-crossed soul mates are ready for their miniseries.
A childhood friendship ebbs and flows over the course of several tumultuous decades in Italy’s recent past.
Olivia, precious and precocious, is being raised on the grounds of the opulent Bolognese villa owned by her grandfather, a prominent industrialist. Sensitive and observant Valerio, the son of the estate’s gardener and caretaker and one of the housekeepers, lives alongside Olivia but hails from an entirely different world. The two form a fast friendship in early childhood, encouraged, for dissimilar reasons, by members of their respective families. As Italy endures the violence and upheaval of the Years of Lead and Red Brigades threats—the specter of kidnapping, or worse, looms over even the drive to nursery school—the duo begins the mutating relationship that will hurl them into and out of each other’s lives and beds over the course of almost 40 years. When Italy evolves into a different era of social and political turmoil during the Berlusconi regime, the relationship of Bonvicini’s maturing companions grows more complicated as youthful optimism gives way to the pragmatism of adult life. A diverse collection of secondary characters, ranging from careless social elites to scrappy urban playmates, support and undermine Olivia and Valerio while the plot unfolds in cinematic settings including Olivia’s family’s villa; the working-class area of Rome where Valerio spends much of his later youth; and the ski slopes of Cortina. Valerio recounts the meandering story of their long liaison and ponders the roles of fate and self-determination over the course of a lifetime, echoing some of his (not to be underestimated) father’s thoughts about the inevitabilities of relationships. Elements of his wide-ranging retrospective bear a resemblance to the incredible coincidences which often propel soap operas.
Bonvicini’s star-crossed soul mates are ready for their miniseries.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63542-062-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
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