Reviews From Readers

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  Descent by Gary V Brill is a fast-paced, captivating crime thriller inspired by the author's life. Brill excels at creating characters that are elaborate and lovable. Steve is an upright, no-nonsense man who is hemmed in from all sides, pursued for something he has no idea about. He has a powerful ally, Susan, a woman whose devotion is impeccable and who displays an unusual intelligence. The characters are intriguing and Steve is one that readers will love to follow. The narrative combines the first-person-narrative and the third-person-narrative voices to create clarity in points of view.  Gary V Brill is a great storyteller who succeeds in creating drama in the narrative while offering scenes that are real and immersive.  Characters like Doug Mitchell are enigmatic and the author uses such characters to create suspense, making readers wonder what they are up to. The writing is crisp and punctuated with engaging dialogues that augment the drama and the pace. Brill has created a tenacious, smart-mouthed, and sophisticated protagonist that makes for a wonderful company and a tale that is delightful to read.  Reviewed By: Jane Riley 

 In this heartbreaking family story, a tenacious man helps the Under ground Railroad Gary V. Brill’s historical novel Journey: The Story of an American Family follows the Woodmans, a Black family in Pennsylvania. The War of 1812 has ended, and the local militia are no longer fighting the British. James Woodman is the strong character at the center of this story. He isn’t enslaved, but nonetheless he is less than free in Pennsylvania. It’s important to learn about how different people experienced this American era. This fictional tale is profoundly informed by that history. Brill deftly reveals how the character James is emotionally attached to his family farm and yet is inspired by dreams of border crossing, with all the implied promise of freedom. The scenes of his life that comprise the novel are unrelentingly violent. In the novel’s opening, a constable knocks him down and says: “You know your type is not allowed on our streets after dark…” This characterizes many of his interactions throughout the novel. He faces—and uses—fists, knives, rifles. There are kidnapped children and repeated threats of lynching. Hostile strangers demand a horse and kill a pet cat. James doesn’t shrink from responding to violence with the force necessary for his survival, and he con tinually lands in such danger, partly due to his commitment to helping formerly enslaved people escape to freedom. Though James does meet white Quakers who assist with the Underground Railroad, most white characters in this story are execrable. James knows that if he fights them and leaves any alive to tell the tale, it may haunt him forever. The novel follows the Woodman family for years, as well as James’s friend Luke, a man who escaped slavery. The characters’ life stories are layered and detailed. James purchas es the freedom of Abigail from her enslaver, Francis Scott Key (yes, the one famous for writing the lyrics to the “Star-Spangled Banner”), and James and Abigail marry. We watch the children grow up. In 1830, James and Abigail’s children Jonathan, Francis, and little Abbie are between the ages of seven and fourteen, and Luke and his wife Anna live nearby. Abigail is willing to see her former “master,” Key, again. Her feelings are complex. “I truly wish we lived in a more simple world, a place where right and wrong were always obvious,” she explains to one of her children. “But we do not.” In other respects, the narrative can be emotionally curt. When the matriarch fades away on the farm, James is said to be “bereft and unable to think clearly,” but the story cuts to a few months later when the snow has disappeared and it is “time to get back to work.” The novel educates about the changing political situation in a place and time where the legal status of slavery was in flux. Some states were voluntarily abolishing slavery, but not without intense political fights. “Governor Ritner had come out as an abolitionist and praised Pennsylvania for starting to outlaw slavery in his annual message to the State Legislature,” Brill writes, but the progress could be slow and incremental and wasn’t guaranteed to hold. It should be mentioned that, in characters’ spoken interactions, white men frequently use the “n-word” to intimidate and discredit Black people. The slavers, including hunters of runaways, don’t always know or care about a Black person’s status under the law, and their use of a racial slur reinforces and communicates their worldview. They are prepared to continue enslaving, or to begin enslaving, any Black person. This is potentially educa tional for readers who aren’t already aware of the historical link between racial slurs and physical violence. Journey makes this connection abundantly clear. The racist characters speak entirely differently from the abolitionists. However, readers who are already aware of the era’s physical and verbal violence may simply be overwhelmed by its intensity. In the scenes that give respite from the violence, readers can immerse themselves in the scene on the farm: “the water jug down on the wagon floor,” potatoes, squash, apple butter, ham from the last hog. It’s a landscape that demands hard work and is never empty of memories and risk. Journey shines here. This novel raises important questions about identity and freedom. We often think of free dom as a description of what we truly already are, have, and deserve—and, in that sym bolic sense, as something we can never lose. Other times, some of us need to physically fight those who try to take our freedom away. In Journey, both are true.   

Brill’s promising debut collection of short stories enjoyably navigates the streets and the heart of the Hungarian capital.

All the central characters of these stories seek direction, including a widower who’s traveled to Budapest to learn to play jazz, a librarian who’s become disconnected from the world, and a secret policeman who struggles to comprehend post-communist Hungary. The ever present chaos of the capital’s traffic encircles them as they attempt to carve routes through their own lives. The opening, first-person story, “Taxi!,” is written with such honest fluidity that readers may be fooled into mistaking it for autobiography. In it, San Franciscan Allan Simmons is on a mission to rediscover life after the death of his spouse. He hopes to achieve this by learning to play jazz piano but finds difficulty integrating into a city where he speaks little of the language and struggles to bridge the cultural gap. By chance, he meets Tibor, a taxi driver and fellow jazz aficionado, which allows him to experience the true embrace of Hungarian hospitality. It’s by far the standout story of an emotionally insightful, rewarding collection. In the elegantly written, sad, and charming tale “Getting Lost,” Maria, a lonely librarian, is unnerved by the sudden arrival of a mysterious gentleman who courts her attention. “Bullies,” about Lsazlo Hajdu, an ice-cold former member of the secret police, recalls communist Hungary’s atmosphere of intimidation and suspicion and considers how such ideologies linger on in the present. The author captures the vibrant hum of the city and revels in playing the flâneur, keenly observing the populated streets with brio: “I walked down streets I had never been on before...through pretty little squares with children playing...past a music school and listened to the sound of violins filling the air.” Overall, the collection is stylistically reminiscent of Paul Auster’s short stories, and it’s a must for anyone interested in Budapest.

Moving, descriptive, and seductive urban tales.