Another strong story collection that displays the author’s trademark thoughtfulness, humanity, and wit.
Ordinary people practice the magic of deception in Appel’s (Einstein’s Beach House, 2014) short story collection, which won the 2014 Serena McDonald Kennedy Award for fiction.
These eight stories, all previously published in literary journals, deal insightfully with the vanity of human wishes. At the end of this, his 10th book since 2013, Appel—an attorney, physician, bioethicist, essayist, and fiction writer—describes himself as “strikingly ordinary.” That seemingly contradictory and perhaps deceptive statement captures what’s so engrossing about his characters: they’re ordinary people who are strikingly, but sometimes deceptively, themselves. Often, they use deceit to navigate grief, loss, or desire. In “The House Call,” for example, Miriam’s young son has died. She once had an acting job in which she portrayed a patient for medical students. While visiting her son’s grave, she runs into one of those students, Jeannie, who remembers her gratefully. When Jeannie seems disappointed that Miriam didn’t pursue acting as a career, Miriam pretends to have cancer—only later to discover that Jeannie never became a doctor. This story’s conclusion demonstrates the rich interplay between fact and fiction and the longing for connection that inhabits these tales, even when that connection is based on pretense: “For a brief moment, I let myself believe that if she’d been a real doctor, and I’d actually had cancer, she’d have been able to heal me.” Appel reveals character well, through narrative voice, dialogue, and often through profession, as in “The Ataturk of the Outer Boroughs,” in which a Turkish-American locksmith fights eminent domain by chaining and locking people “to awnings, to drainpipes, to bicycle stands.” Though the characters are often frustrated in their desires for love, success, security, or revenge, they generally come to a rueful sort of peace—often after a tough decision and often in the midst of absurdity. The author handles tone beautifully, mustering a seriocomic deadpan in “Natural Selection,” as a father decides how to handle a baboon that his daughter rescued from a research lab, or in the titular tale, in which a laundromat gains a reputation for performing miracles (“Mrs. Garcia announced that Mae West—a.k.a. washer number sixteen—had cured her chronic incontinence”).
Another strong story collection that displays the author’s trademark thoughtfulness, humanity, and wit.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Snake Nation Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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