An action-packed thriller full of authentic human drama skillfully depicted.
In this debut novel, a young blind woman participates in an experiment that could restore her sight but becomes unwittingly drawn into a dark, scientific conspiracy.
Audra Carter lost her sight when she was 10 years old in a tragic car accident that killed her mother. But it’s hard to consider this 24-year-old woman disabled because she’s so independent. She’s a DJ who spins the “coolest ambient beats” and is gifted with a high degree of “blindsight”: “The remarkable ability among some of the visually impaired to sense objects even though they have no visual field, even if totally blind.” In fact, Audra can maneuver a bicycle and fend off an assailant. Her father, Jenson, a scientist working on a possible cure for blindness, assembles a group of test subjects, including his own daughter, and administers an experiment. The experiment fails, but when the test subjects start to turn up murdered, Jenson becomes a “person of interest.” He suspects his collaborator, Stefan Vanek, is somehow involved. Then Audra is kidnapped and used as a lab rat to develop “mysterious skills” that can be employed in nefarious activities. Mallery artfully combines two genres in one book: a crime drama that follows Jenson’s race to find Audra before it’s too late, and an SF tale about the technological possibilities for expanding human potential. The author also includes a surprisingly thoughtful portrayal of the experience of blindness, rendered lucidly and poignantly: “After the accident took her sight, she often sensed something beyond the void. Unheard voices, unseen faces. Back then, it had been the seeds of nightmares, of waking screaming at night, her father rushing to her room, holding her tight.” But this is primarily a thriller, and while the action is briskly paced, Mallery does tend to favor the heavy-handedly melodramatic, an inclination evidenced by his uninhibited use of italics. Nevertheless, this tale is an intelligently conceived work, driven more than anything else by fully developed characters in the throes of real human emotions.
An action-packed thriller full of authentic human drama skillfully depicted.Pub Date: June 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64437-061-2
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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