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Timeless Revenge

In Warburton’s debut novel, a village massacre in Vietnam by U.S. operatives ignites new violence 30 years later, and reunites a lone survivor with her rescuer.
Tom Warburton is a member of the British army who’s been living under an assumed identity in Australia for the past three decades. He was forced into this exile after his small Special Air Service unit killed a band of CIA-led soldiers in Vietnam who were attempting to brutalize a young Vietnamese girl—the only survivor of a village the Americans destroyed. The CIA, however, blames the village massacre on Tom’s unit. After Tom went into hiding, his only comfort was a secret correspondence with Sue, the girl he helped rescue, who’s now a member of the Malaysian Secret Service. She and Tom carry on a long-distance romantic relationship. But the promotion of Richard Macauley, the son of an agent killed that infamous day in the jungle, means that Tom and Sue are once again in the CIA’s crosshairs. As the couple avoids Richard’s vengeance, they get a chance to expose the horrors perpetrated on Sue’s family, and also finally live a life together. Warburton’s debut thriller hits all the usual thriller notes, taking its characters to locations all over the world for hushed conversations and violent confrontations. The CIA operatives make truly despicable villains; although not all of Macauley’s agents are as malevolent as he is, their cutthroat methods are no less sickening. The novel manages to capture the tangible regret in Tom and Sue’s relationship; the time that they’re forced to live apart feels tragic, even when compared to the destruction of the village. Despite this, the book is plagued by subject and tense confusion, inconsistent and often incorrect punctuation (“Is the girl OK Tom. Get her to safety mate for me”), and numerous, distracting typos (“We are human as well mam”). Run-on sentences are common, but not in a way that suggests any unique narrative voice, and the end result is an inscrutable tangle that works against the suspense.
A promising premise, lost in clumsy prose that fosters more confusion than intrigue.

Pub Date: June 11, 2013

ISBN: 978-1483649597

Page Count: 468

Publisher: Xlibris

Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

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

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