A smart, unorthodox, and delectable superpower tale.
A man burdened by visions featuring multilingual words possesses a remarkable ability some believe could threaten the world in this thriller.
Caught in a wildfire, California teacher Jon Wanamaker and his bus driver friend, Ernie Renssalear, dodge an unknown assailant’s gunshots. As if that weren’t enough, they later find floating in nearby Lake Isadora a bottle with a brain and note inside. The cryptic note references the Upsweep Project and Amelynd Island, both of which reporter Remedy Conover learns about for an article she’s writing. She’s shocked to discover that four years ago, every human subject in Upsweep, a secret government-funded study, died except one—her ex-husband, Jon. Since the project, Jon has intermittently seen words, like printed text, overwhelm his field of vision. The words appear as “ribbons” (digital ribbon boards) and in multiple languages, including Tlingit of Jon’s Native American clan. But they also lead Jon to an extraordinary ability; some associated with Upsweep want him to develop this power while others, such as the gunman at the wildfire, consider him too dangerous to live. Various parties converge in Sirretta Valley to either help Jon or somehow ensure he doesn’t become a menace. Cray’s (Piercing Maybe, 2018, etc.) twisty tale unravels at a frantic pace. Plot turns make some of the characters all the more striking: Individuals from Jon’s Alaskan hometown, for example, blame him for the death of a young girl. Furthermore, the story explores multiple sclerosis-afflicted Remedy, whose disability is a condition, not a flaw. It even precipitates the indelible image of the reporter using a kitchen broom as an aid instead of a cane. Little can be said regarding Jon’s ability without spoiling the narrative. But it’s on full dizzying display in a smashing final act that should leave readers debating who the real villain is—or if there is one. Unsurprisingly, the prose is linguistically appealing: “Firefly-like sparkles flashed as daylight caught the tiny shards of glass sprinkled across the man’s filthy cheeks.”
A smart, unorthodox, and delectable superpower tale.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-940317-08-3
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Third Quandary Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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