by Andy Giesler ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 14, 2019
An often mesmerizing end-of-the-world adventure.
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In this debut novel set in a post-apocalyptic future, a young woman struggles to uncover the truth about her heritage.
A woman named Root remembers how she always felt different from the other people in her village. She was the blind daughter of a “weaver”—a revered village herbalist and wise woman—and she had a penchant for asking unwanted questions. According to village beliefs, to break from tradition and attempt to “remake the World That Is” would have devastating results. Many suspect that Root had a strange illness known as “the Nothing” within her—a condition that could eventually cause a person to transform into a savage, bestial “chimera.” To prevent this transformation, those thought to suffer from the Nothing were given a sedative drink and then burned alive in the Goodafter Pit. Root was 17 when she started hearing a voice in her head and soon gained extraordinary abilities. Her resulting flight set her on a path to discovering the true origins of the World That Is, which centers on a cataclysmic event known as the Reckoning. Crafty surprises abound in this debut novel as Giesler’s story switches between Root’s narration of the story of her life, framed as a presentation to a gathering of listeners, and the journal of her ancestor Ruth Troyer, who was alive during the initial days of the Reckoning. Giesler does an excellent job of connecting Root’s modern perspective and Ruth’s past knowledge to the rustic setting of the reconstructed civilization. The author also pays close attention to the development of language, religion, and cultural ceremonies across the centuries, resulting in some phenomenal worldbuilding. Root is a feisty, compelling narrator, and although some of her folksy asides are occasionally awkward, her monologue is full of appealing personality.
An often mesmerizing end-of-the-world adventure.Pub Date: June 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73356-761-9
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Humble Quill LLC
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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