A beautiful dose of carnal mayhem set in Purgatory.
This debut fantasy thriller finds an assassin taken out of the killing game only to be thrust into a surreal plot to dethrone a deity.
Former Glasgow street urchin Deborah has killed 38 people at the behest of a shadowy organization called The Orchard. Her handler, Eli, now guides her toward her latest target, a man residing within a sumptuous, unguarded mansion. She makes the assassination look like an accident, giving him a lethal injection between his toes. Moments later, someone shoots Deborah in the chest, killing her. She awakes in a Spartan room, situated in what appears to be an industrial slum full of “bedraggled beggars and throngs of sad-looking civilians.” When Deborah meets the Angels Zotiel and Zephon, they tell her she’s in Purgatory. They bring her to the Archangel Raziel, who informs her that “God is gone” and His Office has been corrupted. Deborah, an atheist, must nevertheless come to grips with her otherworldly predicament. She’s recruited by the Divine Revolution to kill the New God, who has usurped the throne and stripped the angels of power. Murdering the deity, however, means first assembling a proper support team from within the vastness of Purgatory, including a tactician (“I need someone who thinks differently than I do,” Deborah says. “Someone I can work with. Who can consider the long game, while I deal with the immediate”). James aims to scandalize in his raucous novel, boasting no shortage of horrendous flashbacks to teenage Deborah’s life in her aunt’s abusive home and then on the streets of Glasgow with her young lover Mark. Readers follow the path of someone who learns that “Hitman is a very apt word,” because the “same word we use for a kill, a junkie uses for a shot.” The narrative’s parade of shocking moments (like Deborah’s first kill, using a pen on her victim’s neck) should leave fans of garish violence and spectacular action in awe. Leaving his dramatic denouement for future installments, James spends quality time introducing the characters Deborah needs for the mission—like Lena, the nurse, and Whitman, the strategist—in segments that surround a charismatic protagonist with an equally likable cast. Near the end, a ghoulish chase sequence is the cherry on top of a richly disturbing story.
A beautiful dose of carnal mayhem set in Purgatory.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5187-8716-4
Page Count: 490
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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