Magary has created a smartly realized vision of a planet that’s hit the skids, but it could use more interesting residents.
One man blogs civilization’s slow, terrifying decline after a cure for aging is discovered.
In 2011, an Oregon scientist discovered the precise genetic location of the trigger for aging, clearing the way to bring a halt to growing old. In 2019, when Magary’s debut novel opens, narrator John Farrell is one of the growing number of people who’ve surreptitiously signed up for the illegal "cure." He’s an easygoing attorney who hasn’t paid close attention to the religious and political furor the cure has caused, but that changes when his roommate is killed in a terrorist attack on the office of a doctor delivering the treatment. At first this brave new world seems mildly comic: John helps set up term limits for married couples who didn’t anticipate that “till death do us part” might take well over a century, and he considers what the cure means for sports records. But in the decades after the cure is legalized, the planet becomes rapidly overpopulated and the story turns dystopian, with John becoming an “end specialist” who helps euthanize people who find deathlessness a grind. Magary is blogger for the sports sites Deadspin and Kissing Suzy Kolber, and the blog format serves him well in the early sections of the novel: It allows him to integrate newspaper articles that set the scene, and he gives John an engaging, quick-witted voice. Trickier for the author are matters of deeper characterization and tone: John’s romantic entanglements and heartbreaks are swallowed up by the events around him, and the closing chapters make ungainly shifts between apocalyptic realism and Grand Guignol horror scenes. In a way, he’s imagined this milieu all too well, making the reader more interested in the world’s end than the people trying to survive it.
Magary has created a smartly realized vision of a planet that’s hit the skids, but it could use more interesting residents.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-14-311982-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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