A sleek and subversive thriller that should appeal to readers who enjoy edgy fiction.
A chance encounter sends two strangers on a wild ride through the streets of Los Angeles, where the stakes are high.
In this thriller, Friday evening means a night of hard partying for Brooke. The spoiled trust fund daughter of actor Danny Ryan, she spends her days lost in a haze of absinthe and coke, hopping from one hot Los Angeles area night spot to the next and documenting her exploits on social media. She ends up at the Doheny Room, where she parties with her friend Ashley and Ashley’s boyfriend, Jared. While Brooke enjoys her evening, an actor named Chase hooks up with Melissa, a young waitress. A former bartender plucked from obscurity, Chase gained fame starring on a teen TV drama called All That Glitters. He believes Melissa may be “The One,” until he murders her. A serial killer, Chase targets the bartenders, servers, and waitresses of Hollywood’s trendiest restaurants and nightclubs. The next night, Brooke and Chase meet by chance when they share the same Uber. After Brooke casually invites Chase to join her, they embark on an odyssey that begins with the search for drugs and ends with an unforgettable house party. The latest novel from Adam (Keep Santa Monica Clean, 2016, etc.) is a twisty and transgressive tale of two jaded and troubled strangers discovering an unlikely connection. On the surface, Brooke appears to be a shallow party girl whose only concern is how she appears on Snapchat or Instagram. But the author subtly adds an undercurrent of vulnerability and emptiness to her glamorous facade, particularly in her references to the “stranger wearing my face.” Chase is a multifaceted and compelling protagonist and villain. A successful actor and aspiring screenwriter, he chooses his victims based on his past as a bartender and nostalgia for the lifestyle. Adam’s sharp and economical prose is punctuated by moments of acerbic humor. When asked by his psychiatrist if he thinks he is insane, Chase replies, “No, I’m a television actor.”
A sleek and subversive thriller that should appeal to readers who enjoy edgy fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64606-948-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Post-Entropy
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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PERSPECTIVES
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