A tense, perceptive tale of an investigation into a terrifying threat.
In Rubin’s (Eating Bull, 2015, etc.) thriller, a medical student’s friends and acquaintances become mysteriously, deathly ill—possibly due to a curse.
American Ben Oris and his Haitian best friend, Laurette, have a great time during a trip to Paris, aside from their excursion into the catacombs. There, 18th-century human bones seem to call to a dazed Ben, so he touches a femur that cuts his hand. Two weeks later, he returns to his internal-medicine clerkship in Philadelphia, despite the fact that his hand isn’t fully healed; meanwhile, Laurette has bloody visions of Ben hurting others. Then Ben’s landlady’s daughter, Kate, with whom he’s had an occasional romantic fling, shows up at the hospital with an assortment of odd symptoms. Soon, other people are sick, as well, and all have links to Ben. Laurette surmises that the illnesses are because of a curse that’s connected to the catacombs bone, and she recommends that Ben get help from some of her family members, who practice Vodou. He’s skeptical of this idea, but then Laurette’s visions correctly predict the arrival of a baby—Ben’s newborn son from a one-night stand. With no medical solution in sight, Ben realizes that he has to embrace unusual methods in order to save others, including his son, from potential danger. Rubin’s novel is a solid medical thriller with a touch of the supernatural. Her sharp prose is rife with medical jargon, but it’s always comprehensible; it’s perfectly clear, for example, that a high eosinophil (white blood cell) count is a bad thing and indicative of sickness. Ben is an appealing protagonist, but the myriad secondary characters shine too, including Laurette; Willy, Ben’s dad; and hard-edged attending physician Taka Smith, who becomes more sympathetic as the story goes on. The explanation of the curse reveals a fairly simple origin, but it’s one that allows a potent final act and a ceremony that could entail a good deal of bloodletting. The story also treats the Vodou religion respectfully; as Laurette says, it’s “not the Hollywood version of voodoo dolls and zombies.”
A tense, perceptive tale of an investigation into a terrifying threat.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-940419-97-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: ScienceThrillers Media
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2017
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
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
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