An ambitious, if sometimes-flummoxing, dystopian offering.
Alpha males and Omega women clash in this erotic fantasy novel about the power dynamics of sex and gender.
It’s a great risk for Omega woman Claire to enter Thólos Citadel, where brutish Alpha males live, but she has no choice. Disguised and ostensibly aided by blue pills that she’s been taking that suppress her “heat,” she seeks a man named “the Shepherd,” who may be able to help her; the few Omega women left are starving, and Claire is on a mission to save them. Shepherd rescues her from a dangerous situation, but he’s also quick to take advantage of her sexually, as she’s currently fertile, or “broadcasting a heat cycle.” He then reveals that he wants to enslave the Omega women, not help them. Claire is trapped for weeks before she can escape and get the help of Corday, a Beta male who has more free will than other men. It turns out that something more menacing is planned for the Omegas and that the blue pills that Claire has been taking are not at all what they seem. As tensions rise between the Omegas and the Alphas, more is revealed about Claire’s history. Intense dialogue keeps the story moving, although it’s sometimes muddled by the extensive jargon (“pair-bonded,” “Da’rin markings,” “castoffs”) that populates the novel. There’s no shortage of drama as alliances form and surprising betrayals are revealed. The dynamic between the men and women in this dystopia is a disturbing allegory, and the erotic scenes between Claire and the Shepherd start as sensual and become violent. However, the secondary characters, including the kind Corday and the spirited Nona, one of the Omega women, are ultimately more intriguing than Shepherd and Claire’s tortured relationship. There are apparent attempts to make Shepherd into a more sympathetic character, but readers will likely find it hard to see him as anything more than the brute he is.
An ambitious, if sometimes-flummoxing, dystopian offering.Pub Date: April 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68259-398-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Blushing Books Publications
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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