A fun space romp that’s equal parts goofiness and grandeur.
Melbourne’s sci-fi adventure stars an accountant swept up in the battle against a reality-altering weapon.
In the year 20018, Percival Gynt is an accountant on the planet Sanctuary-8. As he waits for the morning train, a beautiful woman approaches. She asks him, “Are you honest and clever and kind...and does danger always seem to find you?” He eventually answers, “Yes.” She kisses him, apologizes, and steals his bowler hat. Before he can give chase, two police officers take him into custody. They bring him to a government agent named Fred, who explains that the woman who kissed him is Millicent Lamb, the former nanny of an 11-year-old named Kevin. Kevin is missing, and Fred knows that Percival—last survivor of the Gynt Massacre—has the guts to retrieve the boy. The first catch is that he must team up with Officer Um (a froglike Indulian). The second catch is that Kevin embodies an ancient evil known as the Rider, which must not be reunited with the Engine of Armageddon, a machine that can (and does) erase large swaths of reality. Percival will cross paths with the enchanting Tarot (aka Millicent), Aryan soldiers of the Nth Realm, and Matthew “Mouse” Holden, former apprentice to the magician Illuminari, whose death began this crisis. For audiences who like their space operas thoroughly daffy, author Melbourne (Archenemies, 2007) offers an all-you-can-read buffet of batty goodness. Like Douglas Adams, Melbourne’s ideas are off-kilter and funny, but—as importantly—his execution is off-kilter and funny, too. One scene, for example, features alien blobs called Fummers that are “humming a tune that sounded strangely like that old Earth ditty, ‘Hey Ya.’ ” The romance between Percival and Tarot is as charming as it is torturous. Elsewhere, mentions of Grimsouls (reanimated killing machines) being the product of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline skewer a future in which corporations join humanity in colonizing space. Longtime sci-fi fans should appreciate Melbourne’s creative endurance as he crafts an ever twisting plot that lets dust settle on none of his characters, including the legendarily “not dead” Vargoth Gor.
A fun space romp that’s equal parts goofiness and grandeur.Pub Date: May 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9998748-0-6
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Ruesday Books
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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