An exceptional story of the future that quietly sounds an alarm about extremities of human behavior.
As climate change turns the United States into a storm-ravaged swamp in the late 21st century, three sets of refugees attempt an unauthorized border crossing into Canada in Willis’ (Deadly Highway, 2018, etc.) post-apocalyptic tale.
In 2086, most of Florida and New Orleans no longer exist thanks to rising sea levels. Georgia swells with homeless people, and waves of migrants struggle north to Canada, where right-wingers in the Ottawa government have tried locking down the border. Texas, a fetid bayou, is where the Wilkins family dwells, safe but discontented in domed, bleak corporate oil-company housing. They’re surprised when beer-drinking, abusive patriarch Frank Wilkins agrees to leave for Canada for a fresh start; in truth, he just wants to rejoin his younger mistress, who moved there. Divorced Savannah accountant Harry Sykes, his house ruined in a hurricane, embezzles from a disaster relief fund so that he and his college-age son can flee north. In corrupt Chicago, Cynthia “Cyndie” Sherwood is the pampered but fed-up trophy wife of a successful but philandering lawyer. Using his ties to the migrant-smuggling underworld, she joins a transport with her disgruntled, adolescent daughter in tow. The narrative brings the entire ensemble together for a harrowing exploit. In plainspoken and quietly unnerving language, Willis effectively gives weight even to minor characters and sometimes manages to jolt readers with unexpected revelations. Readers who are looking for future-tech thrills or creatively envisioned ruins in an apocalyptic-dystopic milieu may be disappointed, though; aside from subcutaneous identification chips, self-driving autos, drones, and roll-up pocket computers, the sci-fi gimmickry quickly falls away. Instead, this is an elemental drama of fairly ordinary, often uncouth people on an arduous, quavering journey, pushed to their limits and crossing boundaries—of nations, of laws, of morality—for the sake of survival or just plain selfishness.
An exceptional story of the future that quietly sounds an alarm about extremities of human behavior.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-68433-361-5
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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