A funny and thoroughly satisfying farce involving cinema and an escaped monkey.
A frustrated filmmaker tries to help his actor father save a monkey in this comic novel.
New Jersey, 1999. Would-be auteur Kevin Stacey is directing what he hopes will be his breakout independent feature, but things are going poorly. His crew is cranky; his actors are difficult; his budget is gone; and he’s starting to think he should have gone to law school. Things only get worse when his semiestranged father, Edward Stacey (stage name: Brian Edwards), shows up in a raincoat with a thick roll of cash, a handgun, and a capuchin monkey named Henry. Edward is a perennial extra with over 600 Hollywood films on his resume. “Name a film and my father was probably in it,” Kevin explains, “though only for a second, his face and body somewhere in the background, in the crowd, in the forgotten patches of the screen where the audience never looks.” It turns out Henry was recently freed from a research lab and the FBI is anxious to find him—and whomever liberated him. His heart softened by tales of animal cruelty, Kevin agrees to help his father find a safe home for Henry, though the task will encompass a cross-country road trip and suck in the director’s best friend and occasional lover, Veronica Merrin; his lawyer brother, Mike; and a movie-loving priest named Father Blank. Augello’s prose is sharp and funny, and he has a knack for imbuing ridiculous situations involving Kevin with psychological veracity: “My father sings in the shower, that strange song ‘MacArthur Park’ with its oddball lyrics about cake left in the rain. It’s a long song—he’s been in the shower for nearly ten minutes—yet Henry is enthralled. He sits outside the cracked bathroom door listening to my father croon.” The novel leaps around in time and point of view, which will help keep readers on their toes despite the fairly predictable plot. The story is a love letter to the movies—a very ’90s one at that—as well as a ’90s commentary on the treatment of lab animals. But at its best, the book is a sweet rumination on the relationships between difficult fathers and their sons.
A funny and thoroughly satisfying farce involving cinema and an escaped monkey.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68433-826-9
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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