Goddard's ultimately tepid thriller gets off to a quick start but never manages to build on its initial momentum. US Fish and Wildlife Service covert operations badass Henry Lightstone and his jocular yet equally badass buddies have a knack for stumbling into the right place at the right time—usually just after a firefight has erupted. For their latest adventure in accidental timing (or is it simply dumb luck?), they pick up the trail of the corporate doom meisters from the International Commission for Environmental Restoration (ICER), whose plans to terrorize the worldwide Green movement Lightstone and his team thought they had thwarted in Prey (1992). Thrust into the sequel, however, is a deadly new variable: an assassin hired by Wildfire, ICER's militant environmentalist opposition, to take down both the committee and those pesky F&W agents. Wildfire's man, a six-foot-ten-inch cipher known only as Riser, is the angel of death, but he meets his match in Lightstone and company. Docile guppy guardians these government boys are not: They're more like ultrabutch eco-cowboys, tempting the disapproval of their superiors and telling bad jokes under a hail of bullets. They wrestle hammerhead sharks bare-handed. They crack sophisticated computer systems. They practice karate. Moving his superheroes to a showdown in the Bahamas, Goddard displays his considerable knowledge of everything from endangered species to boating to guns. On matters of detail, the director of the National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Laboratory shows himself to be a Field & Stream Tom Clancy. Women, however, are interesting mostly for their muscle tone. A welter of technobabble, along with some harrowing action sequences and the reappearance of old enemies, can't keep the novel from floundering as Lightstone and his pals zero in on Wildfire's plot to torch Yellowstone National Park. Gets by on swagger and bravura and a steady diet of shoot- outs—but just barely. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-85424-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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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