An enthralling finish to a thoughtful, uplifting sci-fi series.
The finale to The Seekers trilogy finds Litwack’s (The Stuff of Stars, 2015, etc.) heroes returning to their home of Little Pond, hoping to wrest it from religious fanatics.
A fractured world suffers from spiritual and intellectual darkness. After avoiding war between two tribes across the sea, Orah and Nathaniel sail home to Little Pond. Their vessel is designed by the dreamers—whose minds have merged into a state beyond the physical—and carries more than 30 people, including Kara, mistress of the dreamers’ advanced technology, and Caleb, leader of the builders and warriors dedicated to living in harmony with nature. Also with the group is an “opaque black cube” with “bits of lightning flashing inside like a captive storm.” This device contains some of the disembodied dreamers, who will advise Kara and the seekers on how to handle the repressive Temple of Light. When Orah and her husband reach home, they find Nathaniel’s father a fugitive from the new regime, which denies individuals the freedom to think, feel, or even dress as the spirit craves. When they ask about their friend, the musician Thomas, they’re told, “He’s gone to a darker place.” To save him, the seekers marshal an army to march from Little Pond to Temple City, where the vicars are based. In this third installment, Litwack gives fans a plot both action-driven and cerebral. Though Caleb says, “no change comes without the shedding of blood,” Orah refuses to torture a captive deacon. Instead, they treat the man humanely, and he experiences the seekers’ philosophy firsthand. Portrayals of violence and its consequences will resonate with readers; after a battle, the living “suffered in silence, as if in sympathy with those silenced forever.” Litwack excels in poeticizing his themes with lines like, “If we are the stuff of stars, how can we act like beasts of the field?” All around, a superbly crafted adventure.
An enthralling finish to a thoughtful, uplifting sci-fi series.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62253-438-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Evolved Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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