Unpolished but intricate and fun, even as the plot turns tragic.
A terrorist sleeper agent has fallen in love with his adoptive country, but the arrival of other jihadists threatens to place him back on a dangerous path.
Two Pakistani jihadists are on a collision course in America’s Heartland. One is Yussef, a graduate student and the lone member of a three-year-old terrorist cell in Rockledge, Mo. The second is Jamal, who, accompanied by three other Islamic extremists, has only recently left Pakistan, hoping to infiltrate the United States through Mexico and then meet up with Yussef in order to launch an attack. Yussef’s time in America has changed him however, and the friendships he has made there, along with the affections of his modest, beautiful classmate Rachael, have turned him against the mission—an inopportune problem with the determined Jamal on his way. Elliott’s debut novel is surprisingly complex, never oversimplifying the shades of gray in which it operates; there is no demonizing Islam or holding America up as a guiltless victim—just people making good and bad decisions, either because of tragedies in their pasts or the personalities of those around them. The muted tension of Jamal’s inevitable arrival is magnified by the novel’s ability to endear itself through Yussef’s lighthearted moments, ultimately making the threat of losing them all the more heartbreaking. Character interaction is sometimes weak; inner monologue is where the story is most comfortable, one-on-one conversations between characters (particularly Yussef and Rachael) are strong, but anything more and the book’s dialogue becomes jumbled and cliché. A thriller at its core, a subplot involving the captain of the ship on which Jamal and his fellow jihadists were smuggled across the ocean supplies a little action until the novel’s final, violent crescendo.
Unpolished but intricate and fun, even as the plot turns tragic.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-0984600403
Page Count: 395
Publisher: Rising River
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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