“Fierce Kingdom” is a portrait of a mind at work under macabre duress. “He has stopped saying her name,” Phillips writes of Lincoln, as he and his mother race back into the heart of the zoo. “But she will never really know it all, and that is the thrill,” Phillips writes. “Fierce Kingdom” is a diabolical enactment of a mother’s most tortured and catastrophic thoughts. As “Fierce Kingdom” progresses, we watch Joan go through what I came to think of (informally) as the five stages of terror: panic, lucidity, fury, calm, bravery.

Source: New York Times July 19, 2017 21:45 UTC