Critical of much in the modern world and hardly subtle, this post-apocalyptic tale offers plenty of fury and angst.
A moralistic debut novel focuses on disparate characters caught in a bleak landscape.
As the narrator explains at the outset of his journey, “I wandered blindly and aimlessly through the darkness, often having to pause to cough the dust out of my lungs.” What exactly is causing the darkness or the dust is unclear, although the narrator soon discovers that he is not alone in surroundings that can best be described as post-apocalyptic. Among the “skeletons of decimated buildings” and “charred shells of cars strewn at random like dead leaves” are people with stories to tell. Given the environment in which they are placed, it comes as no surprise that their tales are not happy ones. Take David Steele, a once successful pastor who worked his way up from humble beginnings to become an accomplished author and leader of his own megachurch. After becoming involved in a homosexual relationship, he finds that his accomplishments seem to vanish before his eyes. Then there is an unnamed adolescent whose “voice trembled with pure hatred.” Telling the story of his violent activities with a group of neo-Nazis, the youth details days filled with beer and propaganda that end with him alone, with a gun, in a desert. What the narrator will gather from these accounts remains mysterious, though they all seem to point in one way or another toward God. Working in the tradition of Dante, the author forces the reader to examine the lives of the fallen, whether they happen to be a professional athlete or a young woman in the throes of Los Angeles excitement. The stories of these lives tend to be lengthy, blunt, and incorporated with gems of wisdom. Though the California girl has a lot of clichéd experiences, such as visiting a reality TV star’s home that is “fucking huge, but really tacky,” she is nevertheless able to say quite succinctly: “You know, people always say that kids grow up too fast nowadays. But it seems to me like so many people in this country never grow up at all.” At nearly 1,000 pages, portions prove to be drawn out, but the overall senses of passion and urgency never waver.
Critical of much in the modern world and hardly subtle, this post-apocalyptic tale offers plenty of fury and angst.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 800
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2016
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
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
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