Some interesting exploration of the “evil twin” cliche, but ultimately too ambiguous.
When a teenage girl is revived after nearly drowning, she insists on being called by a new name. Is it trauma—or is she possessed by the spirit of her dead twin?
When Lucy Hamilton’s daughter, Eden, is pulled from a nearby lake in the English countryside, it looks like the worst has happened—until she begins to breathe again. But while still in the hospital, she starts to insist that her name is Eli, which was the name of her unborn brother lost to vanishing twin syndrome. When Lucy and James bring their child home, she cuts her hair, begins to dress more androgynously, and continues to insist that her name isn’t Eden. On one hand, Lucy is relieved, because her relationship with her child has been combative for some time, and this new incarnation is sweet and demonstrative; on the other, she’s concerned, understandably, about what’s really going on. James has no time for this drama; he’s super busy with work (and maybe an affair?) and then his mother dies in a fall down the stairs. Then a boy from Eden’s school is hit by a car. Across these spikes of action, Lucy is also dealing with her own repressed childhood trauma. The strangest thing about this novel is that, despite the title, Barker-White never directly writes in the voice or perspective of Eden, focusing primarily on Lucy as narrator with an occasional chapter dedicated to Charlie, Eden’s best friend. Instead, we are left to try to solve an unsolvable mystery, with insufficient clues and a twist at the end that offers no clarity. The other discomfiting thing is that we are offered a character who seems to identify as male, totally out of sync with his female body, and we are asked to consider this strange and even villainous. At one point Charlie asks whether Eden “want[s] to actually be a boy,” but Eden rebuffs the question; it seems tone deaf not to explore this possibility more directly.
Some interesting exploration of the “evil twin” cliche, but ultimately too ambiguous.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780063341296
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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
More style than substance.
Michaelides takes a literary turn in his latest novel, employing an unreliable narrator, the structure of classical drama, and a self-conscious eye to dismantling the locked-room mystery.
The novel starts off with a murder, and with seven people trapped on an isolated Greek island lashed by a "wild, unpredictable Greek wind." The narrator, soon established as Elliot Chase, then zooms out to address the reader directly, introducing the players—most importantly movie star Lana Farrar. We meet her husband, Jason Miller, her son, Leo, and her friend Kate Crosby, a theater actress. We learn about her rise to fame and her older first husband, Otto Krantz, a Hollywood producer. We learn about Kate’s possibly stalling career and Leo’s plan to apply to acting schools against his mother’s wishes. We learn about Jason’s obsession with guns. And in fragments and shards, we learn about Elliot: his painful childhood; his May–September relationship with an older female writer, now dead; his passion for the theater, where he learned “to change everything about [himself]” to fit in. Though he isn't present in every scene, he conveys each piece of the story leading up to the murder as if he were an omniscient narrator, capable of accessing every character's interior perspective. When he gets to the climax, there is, indeed, a shooting. There is, indeed, a motive. And there is, of course, a twist. The atmosphere of the novel, set mostly on this wild Greek island, echoes strongly the classical tragedies of Greece. The characters are types. The emotions are operatic. And the tragedy, of course, leads us to question the idea of fate. Michaelides seems also to be dipping into the world of Edgar Allan Poe, offering an unreliable narrator who feels more like a literary exercise. As an exploration of genre, it’s really quite fascinating. As a thriller, it’s not particularly surprising.
More style than substance.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781250758989
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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