A lavish historical epic that balances details and emotional impact.
This series opener follows various Pleistocene hominids as they struggle for survival.
In East Africa, 850,000 years ago, Xhosa is a female Homo erectus who enjoys the physicality of hunting and fighting. Her father, who desires peace, is the People’s Leader. Her mother was killed in front of her by one of the vicious Big Heads (Homo sapiens), who want complete control over any territory they find. When her father is likewise killed by Big Heads, Xhosa competes with Nightshade, whom she may mate with, to become the new Leader. Further encounters with the Big Heads bring Xhosa into contact with the handsome Wind, one of two brothers leading the savages. While his brother, Thunder, is remorseless, Wind is willing to talk and reveals a reverence for Xhosa. Meanwhile, in southern Africa, Pan-do (Homo erectus) and his People have been traveling for over a month. They also flee Big Head violence and hope to find a place to settle down, possibly alongside the gentle Homo habilis Uprights. Lyta, Pan-do’s daughter, walks lamely yet is attuned to nature and the realm of the mind in ways unheard of to the People. Her dreams may be the key to uniting disparate clans and finding true safety. Beginning a new trilogy, Murray (Born in a Treacherous Time, 2018, etc.) continues to chronicle how humanity spread across the globe from an origin point in Africa. While taking dramatic liberty with the notion of speech (as readers know it), the author presents characters who face the hard choices that have plagued heroes throughout storytelling’s history. Despite the truth that “the more aggressive, the longer life lasted,” Xhosa knows that the People can’t survive on war alone. Art, dreams, and empathy are bedrock components of society; they also advance the narrative in fabulous ways, including tying Xhosa to famed human ancestor Lucy. The clear message that humanity should live in harmony with nature rather than endlessly consuming and expanding should resonate more than ever with modern audiences.
A lavish historical epic that balances details and emotional impact.Pub Date: March 6, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Structured Learning LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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