A fun and fast-paced space opera.
A young racer enters a competition to save his planet in this sci-fi debut.
In 3834, the planets of the anarchic Milky Way Galaxy are in constant danger of war and invasion from their neighbors. The only strategy to guarantee planetary safety is to come under the shield of the Coalition Protectors of Peace, and the only way to accomplish that is to finish first in the yearly Grand Battle. The Grand Battle is a race, where pilots from different planets ride their battle jets into a vortex, attempting to avoid its obstacles and each other’s firepower. Sashi Oon, the sponsor of her two-planet system, assumes the responsibility for drafting the racer with the best chance of winning, and guiding him through the multi-tiered competition. Only recently awoken from a coma, and still bearing the scars of a recent invasion of her home worlds by the lava soldiers of Maelae, Sashi feels unsure whether she is equal to the task. Against conventional wisdom, she chooses Rev Arden, a young and untested pilot from Earth with whom she has a past. With the help of a motley group of strivers from across the galaxy, Sashi and Rev must beat the odds, save their home worlds, and defeat the Maelae racer that seems intent on eliminating Rev in the Grand Battle. Felando has created a rich, complex universe that immediately captivates the reader, balancing the stakes of the race against the celebrity of the participants, the politics of various planets, the egos of journalists, and the inescapable slogans of advertisers. The author, a master of slogans himself, creates earwigs that stick in the reader’s head, from the tag line of the race (“Win the race. Save your planet.”) to the Maelae’s terrifying motto (“Raw material, you will die!”). While Felando certainly borrows from other sci-fi works and franchises, the novel manages to feel fresh and compelling, with an incisive wit and an imaginative eye. Accompanied by original chapter illustrations, the book offers a universe to which readers will surely wish to return.
A fun and fast-paced space opera.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9967357-0-4
Page Count: 560
Publisher: McBarron Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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