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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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