A solid beginning to a sci-fi series, with the promise of more adventures to come.
A teenager finds new challenges and otherworldly surprises in this debut novel.
At the start of her senior year in high school, 17-year-old Elara Dunlin moves with her mom and dad from Maine to Texas. Elara, a loner, tries to cope with the uprooting. The climate is too hot; she is forced to take a Spanish class with freshmen; and the one friend she makes—Cyrus, whose affable nature and Greek god physique make her heart race—has a jealous cheerleader girlfriend. But Elara stays positive through her setbacks, focusing on things she is good at (calculus, English literature) and things she can make better through her own actions. What really worries her is the young man with the black hair and blue eyes she finds staring at her through the window on her first night in the new house. This same man seems to be stalking her and appearing, quite literally, out of nowhere, first near her alone and then around her and Cyrus when they’re together. Elara and Cyrus, it turns out, share a birthday; when they turn 18, they begin to exhibit supernatural powers. Elara confronts the black-haired stranger. She demands answers, but those answers turn her life—not just her teen existence in Texas, but also her entire personal history—upside down. What secret past do she, Cyrus, and the stranger share? And once it is revealed, what will the future hold? In this series opener, Buckler (Stillness of Time, 2018) writes in an easy, engaging style, foreshadowing the book’s (somewhat expository) turn toward sci-fi but in the meantime building the story upward from the point of view of a normal teen with everyday problems. The romance element serves to ground Elara in readers’ estimation while life lessons are worked unobtrusively into the mix. The text is not without its faults: There are distracting glitches like “Unchartered Territory” and the persistent use of “parent’s” as a plural possessive. And Elara, although generally a convincing first-person narrator, sounds less natural when presenting her thoughts as an inner monologue. Nevertheless, the story is lightly paced, and the characters should appeal to YA and New Adult readers, with the players’ revelatory arcs creating anticipation for the sequel.
A solid beginning to a sci-fi series, with the promise of more adventures to come.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62747-122-0
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Gratus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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