Insightful dystopian tale with dynamic characters and a surfeit of surprises.
A scientist in the late 21st century awakens her cryogenically frozen grandfather for his expertise—an illegal act that puts global authorities on her trail—in this sci-fi debut.
A few years after losing his wife in a plane crash, terminally ill Dr. Evan Feldman hopes he can return from the dead someday. This is a possibility, as his company, Telogene Life Sciences, has secretly developed cryogenic suspension technology. Fifty years after Evan’s death, in 2075, his granddaughter, Dr. Aubrey Harris, is there at his restoration. But there are a few snags. For one, damage to a storage facility resulted in loss of genetic material, so Evan’s “engramic archive”—essentially his digitized memories, thoughts, and feelings—is in another body. More significantly, as the Human Dignity and Decency Act passed anti-cloning legislation two decades earlier, Aubrey and Telogene are breaking the law. While Aubrey is ensnared by the authoritarian Global Federation of Nations, her colleagues Dr. Chen Li Hao and Yin Li evade GFN’s jurisdiction by taking Evan to Luna (aka, the moon) and later Mars. The restored Evan can assist in overcoming a lethal genetic mutation among humans, but the real reason he’s awake involves abundant secrets and may leave him questioning the repercussions of his extended life. Though McWhorter’s novel thrives on mystery and unveiling twist after twist as the story progresses, it also boasts sci-fi trademarks. For example, Earth has been ravaged by worldwide drought and famine, and there’s plenty of chic tech, such as minidrones linked to optical implants. Furthermore, the plot shrewdly tackles the oft-posed question about humans (Do they have souls?), highlighted by Chen’s convincing argument that people are defined by their energy, not their physical forms. The author establishes a steady tempo (intermittently inserting bits of backstory rather than revealing it all at once) and provides most characters with personalities, including the GFN police, or Peacekeepers, pursuing Evan and the others. Despite some finality by the end, there’s a clear setup for a sequel.
Insightful dystopian tale with dynamic characters and a surfeit of surprises.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-983204-90-6
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2018
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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