A lighthearted, endearing sci-fi romp in need of some grammatical polish.
Santos’ sci-fi adventure stars a college student who learns that his dream girl is on a secret mission.
Nicholas attends the University of California in Los Angeles. Classmates call him Moon Boy because he loves all things cosmic (and because he’s so pale). He learns that a class on cosmology will be offered, and he eagerly attends. Making his life even more perfect is the arrival of Zara, a redheaded freshman who recently moved from the East Coast. Zara tells him, “You should not focus on space to fulfill your dreams....Sometimes the things we wish for can be right before our eyes.” While bike riding, Nicholas finds an abandoned countryside shack. It starts pouring, and he runs inside. Lucky for Nicholas, Zara shows up on her own bike. The girl’s beauty and scent of jasmine overwhelm Nicholas, and the two kiss. After they start dating, Zara reveals that she comes from the planet Life in the Andromeda Galaxy. He thinks she’s joking until he wakes up on her spaceship, the Science II. In this optimistic sci-fi journey, Santos (O Outro Lado, 2017, etc.) raises issues of eco-awareness while also exploring the idea of alien abduction. Zara and the crew of the Science II are actually time-traveling Earth descendants from the 641st century on a mission to save King Zador II’s 7-year-old daughter, Princess Isadora, whose rare viral disease may be cured with the help of Nicholas’ indomitable immune system (containing the rare Lymphocyte N sequence). While Santos’ aliens are determined and manipulative, they gain heart while dealing with Nicholas, a soulful Everyman who craves only love and knowledge. The author’s warning—that humanity may shed many failings except its penchant for politics—is valuable indeed. Despite some grammar hiccups (“Nicholas thought that Monday would be a tedious one...with nothing different to happen”), the narrative’s spirited pace ferries readers toward a satisfying ending while setting up a sequel.
A lighthearted, endearing sci-fi romp in need of some grammatical polish.Pub Date: July 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-5214-3653-0
Page Count: 281
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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