A vision of the future that’s both harrowing and endlessly entertaining.
A woman witnesses atrocities in her personal life and the world around her throughout the 21st and 22nd centuries in Birdwell’s (Way of the Serpent, 2015) dystopian novel.
Malia Poole’s love of books makes working at a bookshop an obvious choice, even in mid-21st century after print copies are no longer mass produced. She’s one of the Vintagonists, individuals who believe in preserving old things and have formed an alliance with like-minded factions collectively known as Recall. The U.S. having succumbed to plutocracy, Recall operates covertly but still falls prey to raids from plutocrats’ agents. When agents storm a music venue, Malia’s lover, Eliomar “Lio” Gaston, gets a message to her in time to flee, but he and his sister, Zelda, disappear. Malia herself ducks away in a community run by Simpletons—a self-deprecating name signifying the group’s minimalist movement. By the time she returns home, both Malia and the world have changed. She, for one, has stopped taking age-preventative Chulel, which notoriously causes memory loss, and is visibly older among the drug-induced young. But despite retaining more memories than others, Malia can’t remember a two-year period when she was a teen. Filling in that blank takes her to Nigeria, where she learns of a virus outbreak that prompts global power outages and a peace treaty–defying war. The novel is rich in its futuristic environment. Corporations taking over, for example, is a frighteningly believable concept, while the story’s technology is progressive and fashionable: the digilet is essentially a flexible smartphone that can be worn as a bracelet. There’s likewise instantly comprehensible slang, including expletives such as F-bomb surrogate “zujo.” A highlight is “cush,” touching the digilet’s pliable surface, and a term Malia eventually realizes is outmoded. There are instances where the protagonist is a mere spectator, unaware of what’s going on. She is, however, a woman of mystery, and details of her “blank period” are shocking and catalytic (she’s searching for someone in Nigeria). Tie-ins to the series’ first installment are clever, opening with the same scene as the preceding novel from an alternate perspective.
A vision of the future that’s both harrowing and endlessly entertaining.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5330-9576-3
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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