A small—very small—step up from Saturday morning adventure cartoons.
A super-evil, swarthy zillionaire locks horns with the super-good, fabulously resourceful Kurt Austin (Polar Shift, 2005, etc.) of the National Underwater and Maritime Agency (NUMA).
It seems there has been yet another age-old conspiracy to cover up a truth which would rock the religious world. This tale is based on the possibility that the Phoenicians, master mariners of the ancient world, were repeat visitors to North America, sailing nearly to Harrisburg, Pa., and on the further possibility that one of those voyages involved a treasure so important that it was necessary to secrete the object not far from what would be the Pennsylvania Statehouse, where it might have rested for eternity were it not for the restless curiosity of President Thomas Jefferson, or for the avaricious lust of cruel, present-day international villain Viktor Baltazar. Baltazar has inserted himself into the life and work of fiery, spunky, Italo-Ethiopian UNESCO employee Carina Mechadi, a woman totally and passionately dedicated to the restoration of Iraqi antiquities dispersed in the chaos of war. The ruthless fiend desperately wants his hands on the ancient statue of a Phoenician mariner that Carina plans to exhibit. Baltazar’s brutal efforts to snatch the statue in the middle of the Atlantic put Carina in the way of a Fate Worse Than Death. Fortunately, NUMA’s number one agent Kurt Austin just happens to be in the nautical neighborhood, where he has been lassoing a gigantic iceberg, and he is more than capable of overpowering Baltazar’s goons. Mechadi and Austin, mutually attracted, team up to find out what’s so interesting about that statue, embroiling them in Baltazar’s machinations from the Bosphorus to Chesapeake Bay. Those machinations include tilting on horseback. No kidding.
A small—very small—step up from Saturday morning adventure cartoons.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15419-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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