Audacious stories readers will consume quickly but won’t easily forget.
D.’s debut collection of three SF-flavored tales highlights mermaids, robots, and dystopian worlds.
In the opening title story, Mu, a beautiful woman in Beijing, is accustomed to men hitting on her. Ladi He seems like all the rest, but after taking her to his place, he proves he knows a good deal about Mu’s past and active presence on social media. He asks her to take part in his experiment, in which Ladi introduces Mu to a virtual world he calls Planet Muladi. It seems to be utopian, though it’s not without glitches. But it may be preferable to the real world, where Mu is planning a grim “rebellion.” The titular character of “Nerissa” is a mermaid—an invention of the late 23rd century. She lives in a glass tank until she’s 16, when she finally swims in the sea and meets merman Lynn. She reveres the world above, where there’s sunlight, but Nerissa soon learns that humanity may be harboring a terrible secret. In “Bobo,” Steven Sheng is a transfer student from Hangzhou, China, attending school in Texas. He endures racist bullies who, among other things, mock his limited English. Fortunately, he finds a friend—a reassuring voice from within whose origin is not exactly clear. Throughout the collection, cast members are all well delineated and sympathetic; even Mu, who’s unmistakably narcissistic, is hiding the pain of a fractured family and relationship. The book’s view on humanity is otherwise dim, with an Earth primarily populated by the selfish and mean. But the stories champion a theme of encouragement, underscored by Ladi’s refrain: “The future is whatever you choose to believe.” Overall, these short tales retain a sense of mystery, and each boasts an ending open to interpretation. Correspondingly, debut illustrator Ding’s striking black-and-white images are delightfully ambiguous, providing a few characters with indistinctive facial features.
Audacious stories readers will consume quickly but won’t easily forget.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68925-148-8
Page Count: 189
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
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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