An intelligent and affecting look at the void that lurks inside our social media fantasies of domestic bliss.
The search for a kidnapped child reveals the truth behind her curated onscreen image.
As a child growing up in the French countryside just after the turn of the 21st century, Mélanie Claux finds the only thing that can soothe the empty feeling inside her is watching television, particularly Loft Story, France’s first foray into reality TV. Raised in an emotionally abusive household, Mélanie moves to Paris at the first opportunity. There she attempts to break into the reality television world as a contestant and, when that fails, languishes working at a travel agency until she marries Bruno Diore and has two children, Sammy and Kimmy, who, while beguiling, do nothing to fill the void that is the most central tenet of Mélanie’s life. That is, until Mélanie begins to orchestrate little scenes for the children to enact and uploads the resulting videos to her family YouTube channel. Happy Recess becomes a viral hit, logging several million views per video and earning millions of euros for the family in endorsement contracts and advertising deals, an outcome that seems fair compensation for the near 24-hour visibility the children must endure to keep the channel running. Meanwhile, Clara Roussel grew up in Paris, the daughter of political activists who stormed the filming location of Loft Story in an attempt to free the contestants from their Big Brother–style surveillance. Unlike Mélanie, Clara was raised with care and integrity and brings those values with her into her career as an officer with the Paris Crime Squad. The two women’s lives are thrust together when Kimmy is kidnapped and Clara is called in to investigate. As the kidnapper's demands become more bizarre and the list of suspects lengthens to include practically anyone watching the Happy Recess channel, both women must reckon with the ramifications of living in a world where the most banal details of family life can be packaged and monetized and where the value of human existence is adjudicated not by the actions of the individual but by the reactions of the masses.
An intelligent and affecting look at the void that lurks inside our social media fantasies of domestic bliss.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781609459840
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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