A white-hot ingot of daring, disciplined storytelling that focuses on a dangerous military project.
A sci-fi thriller explores stolen technology and a hacktivist determined to guide humanity’s evolution.
This tale begins at a U.S. Air Force base in Afghanistan. Airman Donald Westlake, a recent convert to skinhead metal music, exits the barracks armed for combat. With violent lyrics screaming through his headphones, he begins shooting Afghani soldiers stationed at the base until he is killed by a fellow airman. Meanwhile, in Austin, Texas, hacktivist Tom Ayana orchestrates flash mob events from the “cyber command center” in his mother’s house. These incidents, which interrupt the lives of unsuspecting citizens in places like San Antonio’s Woodland Park, result in risqué demonstrations and a thrilling sense of connectedness among the participants. Under the digital guise of Swarm, Tom encounters the Meta Militia online and is chosen to play with—that is, augment—the zeph.r code, a stolen Department of Defense project designed to modify human behavior. While Tom and his best friend, a DJ named Xander Smith, combine their love of music, mobbing, and cosmic awareness to dominate the electronic dance music scene, Homeland Security agent Jake Duggan starts investigating Westlake’s death. Jake eventually recruits evolutionary biologist Dr. Cara Park—an expert on swarming insects—to help learn the deadly potential of zeph.r. In the latest book by Garcia (The Decline of Men, 2009, etc.), readers are treated to what might be written if the misanthropic author Chuck Palahniuk gave the free-wheeling Thomas Pynchon a blood transfusion. Garcia’s careening prose covers cutting-edge topics, like using mosquitoes to inoculate against malaria, while also espousing the work of “neo-patriots” like Anonymous, who “would save democracy by keeping it honest.” When Tom experiences the fabulously kinetic zeph.r, there’s “a rising, writhing tower of tessellating textures, each one separate yet fused to the others and seething, like a flame.” Though intellectually and politically supercharged, these elements never prevent the characters’ humanity from carrying the narrative. The ambiguous ending glories in the potential of life-altering technology in the hands of a forward-thinking society.
A white-hot ingot of daring, disciplined storytelling that focuses on a dangerous military project.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9974398-1-6
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Morphic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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