An intriguing science fiction adventure with a message that becomes heavy-handed at times.
In LaMora’s didactic science fiction thriller, an aimless peace officer on a mission to rescue two children from a war-torn planet finds himself on a journey of personal transformation.
When a sentient badger tasks Hayes MacGruder and his partner Murphy to find and return two girls living on a world that has been ravaged by war and recently deemed uninhabitable, all Hayes wants is to finish the mission as soon as possible and leave the polluted, rat-infested planet and its roaming bands of cannibals far behind. But when he learns that one of the girls is actually his daughter from a past life (he was a bank robber in the Old West), he realizes that this fateful meeting with his progeny from a previous life—as well as other members of his “spirit cluster”—is actually the universe giving him yet another chance to rewrite his story by making the right decisions in his life. But little does he comprehend that the fate of every living thing in the universe may very well depend on the choices he makes. As the story progresses, it becomes increasingly metaphorical (Hayes and company must find a diamond that contains “the Story of the Universe” and return it to its rightful place), and not only does character development fall to the wayside but the narrative verges on proselytizing. Although the profoundly powerful message of the novel—the implications of living an unprincipled life—is communicated effectively through diary entries that a senator’s daughter wrote in 2006, that thematic potency is diluted when the author inserts numerous moralizing diatribes that not only affect the book’s narrative flow but take focus off of the characters and their story.
An intriguing science fiction adventure with a message that becomes heavy-handed at times.Pub Date: March 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983106708
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Jeanne D'Arce
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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