First-rate thriller in the vein of Joseph Finder.
When his son goes missing, a successful young businessman searches for him as his own life falls apart.
Newell’s taut, well-constructed debut family drama centers on 32-year-old Gus Delaney, the youngest hedge fund manager in Boston’s Elysium Fund. In 1977, he’s a well-intentioned but vain and somewhat strutting young father of two children, Jack and Lilly, who spend most of their time with Gus’ ex-wife, Victoria, a shrill woman still bitter about the divorce. The novel opens on one such tense scene: it’s Christmas Eve, snow has started falling, and Victoria is hours late arriving to Gus’ house with the children, which causes an awkward family scene once she and the children finally show up. Gus and Victoria are blindsided when Jack disappears the following day, abducted by a messianic religious cult. Giving Jack the new name Augustine, the cult’s overseers forcibly induct him into their ranks, telling him his mother is dead and that only his obedience to their orders will guarantee the continued survival of his father and sister. As a police investigation in the suburb of Boston ramps up and gradually turns its attention to Gus as a possible suspect, Newell skillfully cuts back and forth between the dismantling of Gus’ life and the construction of Jack’s new life. Some of the secondary characters can seem a bit flat as the narrative moves them around the chessboard of a plot, but more effective are the portraits of Gus—his deterioration, then the slow climb to a new understanding of himself—and especially the cult and their creepy inner workings. Jump-cutting between scenes keeps the story gripping even in more utilitarian chapters, and the police investigation and missing child case—conducted without the aid of modern technology—feel authentic in every detail.
First-rate thriller in the vein of Joseph Finder.Pub Date: June 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4575-3670-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2015
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
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