Ideas worth examining get buried beneath weak character development.
A debut novelist takes on campus politics.
Ingrid Yang is about to turn 30. She’s been working on her Ph.D. for eight years, she’s about to run out of funding, and her dissertation is a handful of notes on a writer she never wanted to write about in the first place. Xiao-Wen Chou’s work is anodyne and unchallenging, but, before he died, he was Barnes University’s most famous faculty member, and Ingrid’s adviser thinks that studying Chou will allow her to explore her own “Chinese heritage”—never mind that her family is actually from Taiwan. A shocking discovery about her subject takes her work in a new direction and turns her world upside down. This is a promising setup, but author Chou doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. There are moments that seem to be aiming for screwball comedy—such as when Ingrid and her best friend, Eunice, engage in some breaking and entering—but they're not funny. There are definitely attempts at satire, but Chou’s takes on both political correctness and the people who hate it are generally facile. For example, Ingrid’s adviser begins as a White guy who immerses himself in Chinese culture and ends up a right-wing pundit with a rabid following. The connection between intellectual and artistic colonization and White nationalism is an interesting one, but Chou makes the choice to turn a subtly ridiculous character into a cartoon villain instead of interrogating that connection. Ingrid’s nemesis, campus activist Vivian Vo, follows a similar trajectory. She’s introduced as a caricature of a social justice warrior and eventually becomes truly malevolent. At a superficial level, this is the story of Ingrid becoming socially conscious. In some scenes, Chou does a great job of showing the reader why Ingrid is reluctant to identify as East Asian. In others, though, Ingrid comes across as not merely dismissive of Vivian and her ideas, but mostly unaware of the conversations about race that have been taking place on college campuses since at least the 1990s. Her dogged ignorance takes some of the shine off what is presented as a triumphant awakening.
Ideas worth examining get buried beneath weak character development.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-29835-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.
More than a decade after a Georgia man is convicted of a monstrous double murder, an uncomfortably similar crime frees him and resets the search for the guilty party.
In Clifton County, home to the Rich Cliftons and the other Cliftons, the disappearance of teens Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker during the Halloween festivities hits everyone in North Falls hard. Working with her father, Sheriff Gerald Clifton, Deputy Emmy Lou Clifton hears the clock ticking down as she races frantically to get leads on the two friends, who’d been secretly plotting to take off for Atlanta after some undisclosed big score. As a longtime friend of Madison’s mother, Hannah, Emmy hopes against hope to find the missing teens before they’re both dead. By the time Emmy’s hopes are dashed, two unpleasantly likely suspects with strong attachments to underage sex partners have emerged, and one of them ends up in prison. In a bold move, Slaughter jumps over the next 12 years to the case of Paisley Walker, a 14-year-old whose disappearance catches the eye of retiring FBI criminal psychologist Jude Archer, who promptly crosses the country to come to Clifton County and take charge—um, that is, consult—on this heartrending new investigation. Emmy, suddenly and shockingly deprived of counsel from the parents who’ve supported her all her life, doesn’t get along any better with Jude than with the larger circle of Cliftons and the Clifton-Cliftons. But together they identify one new suspect, then another, before a shootout that arrives so early you just know there are still more surprises to come.
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780063336773
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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