An inventive work of alternate history.
A novel imagines a time jump that places World War II 100 years earlier.
It is 1942, and Jim Bridger Edwards—a former carnival performer and current captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—has been sent to Soviet-occupied Iran to shore up the Trans-Iranian Railway for military use. “I get my job done,” muses Jim (who harbors multiple personalities), “so the army doesn’t ask too many questions about how sane I am. And they let me play with high explosives.” His secretive Soviet hosts are trouble enough, but when the sun suddenly moves backward in the sky and people and vehicles—or parts of them—begin to disappear, Jim realizes he has much larger problems to deal with than an old railroad. An invisible, rubbery wall has descended across a whole section of the globe, plunging everything within its perimeter back to an earlier time period. Along with Mariya, a Russian woman of dubious loyalties, and Loki, a mysterious man with some knowledge of time travel, Jim must make his way through Europe to put a stop to the Nazi war machine. In this new reality, the United States is even more vulnerable than it was in the previous one. If Hitler’s armies reach North America, they won’t be met with the technology from 1942—but rather from 1842. Cozort (Wrath of Athena, 2016, etc.) writes in a breathless, accessible prose that gallops through the story with little pause. Although the sci-fi premise is rather complex, he unspools it with a directness and ease that rarely leaves the reader confused. The mix of time periods—with particular attention paid to the armaments of each—should please fans of military history, and the author’s imaginative blending of worlds will likely appeal to the broader speculative audience. Peripheral characters feel a bit flat, but Jim’s psychological state remains complex and compelling. The first book in a planned trilogy, it leaves off at a place that should assuredly hook readers for the next installment.
An inventive work of alternate history.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5451-1823-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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