A gripping, macabre action story only occasionally marred by slow spots.
When a Mayan god threatens to wreak havoc on Earth, a young man and his friends must confront their shared destiny.
Young Juan Guerrero has a fighting spirit inside him that he calls his Wolf. His grandfather Manuel was teaching him how to use his powers, but when an armed gang, including several odd members completely covered in black robes, came to the Guerrero’s small village in Mexico and murdered Manuel, Juan’s Wolf took charge of his body. When the dust cleared, most of the gang was dead, the rest were on the run and Juan was in a jail cell. Dr. Gottschalk, an archaeologist at a nearby temple complex to which Juan’s family had a longstanding connection, bails Juan out after he agrees to act as a sort of bodyguard to the doctor’s son Mark. Juan and Mark develop a close friendship, one so close that it is barely threatened by the appearance of Kat O’Riley, a spirited graduate student working at the site. Soon, Mark and Juan have intense feelings for Kat and she for them, but this doesn’t sit well with Mark’s mother, who has plans for her son and Eleanor, a grad student who has had her eye on Mark for some time. Meanwhile, bad things are happening in and around the site, things that seem to hint at a deeper destiny for Mark, Kat and Juan, as well as Juan’s Wolf. Talon’s novel is steeped in a deliciously dark supernatural atmosphere and full of tense action sequences intercut with scenes of lighthearted youthful palling around. While some expository sequences belong on the cutting room floor, for the most part the plot is compelling enough to keep the reader interested. Some of the youthful banter feels forced, but there is more than enough well-wrought action and wonderful creepiness to counteract the rough bits.
A gripping, macabre action story only occasionally marred by slow spots.Pub Date: April 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1450760072
Page Count: 413
Publisher: David Talon
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2011
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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