The ninth and first hardcover installment in the bestselling paperback series Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. At a slightly future date when the FBI and other police organizations admit the existence of vampires, witches, zombies, etc., Anita Blake’s job is to kill monsters—though she considers herself one as well. Anita has been a vampire’s lover, a werewolf’s mate, a zombie queen, and for the past year has been learning ritual magic and methods for animating the dead. Meanwhile, the humorless Anita is quite analytic and tiresomely long-winded; one reads on and on waiting for her to shut up and for something to happen. Finally, Anita is called to Santa Fe by her old monster buddy, Edward, who works under the name “Ted Forrester” as a bounty hunter licensed to kill varmints such as lycanthropes (a legal activity in rancher-run states like New Mexico). Edward is hundreds of years old but as “Ted” is engaged to marry late-thirtyish Donna Parnell, mother of two. Anita is stunned and angry about what she sees as a breach in the monster code, though she too lusts to have an affair with a normal human. Edward/Ted needs Anita’s help on a tough case. He takes her to a hospital where several victims lie flayed but still alive; a serial mutilator has expertly stripped them of their skin and eyelids, leaving no knife marks, then brutally ripped off their noses, penises, testicles, and breasts. How have these meat-naked bodies resisted infection? Who could do such a dastardly thing? The answers, which do not come quickly, bring forward lots of monsters, including a blue-eyed, blond werejaguar who can slip out of his skin and whose wounds heal as fast as a vampire’s. The story takes a long time to get going, but once it does Hamilton sets a good pace and weaves a nifty tapestry of glowy-eyed monsters against a background of blood.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-441-00684-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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
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