A smart, satirically streaked novel.
Viktor Moroz, an engineer and well-known Jewish refusenik in mid-1970s Moscow, is offered a Faustian bargain by the KGB after he is seen fleeing a murder scene.
Viktor has discovered the dead bodies of his friend Albert Schwartz, a gay human rights activist and provider of goods and services, and a U.S. official with suspected ties to the CIA. They have both been killed with an ax. If he finds the murderer, Viktor will be allowed to leave the USSR along with his new wife, Oksana, a teacher and clandestine publisher. If he refuses to collaborate with the KGB, he will be put on trial for the murder himself—not a look the state wants with U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger soon arriving for nuclear talks. Viktor knows that the better naysayers like him are known in the West, the less likely it is they will be arrested. But he also is familiar with the documented theory that people who are threatened with prosecution in an antisemitic case like his “will eventually prevail.” The book is populated by spies, intellectuals, dissidents, diplomats, and others with secret lives including Madison “Mad Dog” Dymshitz, the shifty young Moscow bureau chief of an American newspaper, and Mikhail Kiselenko, a Russian Orthodox priest of Jewish descent. The Master and Margarita, The Cherry Orchard, and the samizdat literary movement play major roles here, as does The Laws of Jewish Life, a Canadian do-it-yourself guide to Judaism. The book sometimes bogs down in dialectics and broadsides: “Kissinger is about Kissinger. Kissinger would not have stood in the way of the Nazis throwing Jews in concentration camps, his own grandparents included.” But this is another strong performance by Goldberg—after The Yid (2016) and The Chateau (2018)—a master at dissecting divided souls.
A smart, satirically streaked novel.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781250208590
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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