An engaging thriller with an academic setting that readers wouldn’t want to be caught dead in.
A debut novel proves that college can literally be murder.
Of course, Nowhere Island University isn’t your average institution of higher learning. Nathan Jacobs, Sherman’s protagonist, learns this very quickly. NIU is actually a prep school for mercenaries, drawing students from terrorist and paramilitary groups around the globe. So how did Nate, admittedly adrift when it comes to his life plans, end up here? Nate got recruited at his high school Career Day by the shadowy spy agency UNIX and was sent in undercover to investigate NIU. Joining him is John Marshall, another UNIX plant. Nate fears that he’s in over his head but soon shows that he can hold his own alongside more experienced students. But he’s hamstrung by having a moral compass: “There are people who will hurt the people I love, maybe because of irrational hatred, maybe because they think it will make a point or profit, or maybe because they’re the kind of sicko who enjoys it.” He’s inducted into a secret society comprising seven of the school’s fiercest fighters. While all of the students have to watch their backs, Nate discovers that the biggest obstacle is the curriculum, which produces a high fatality rate. So it becomes a never-ending struggle for Nate and his new friends to outlast the sadistic program set up by the school masters. Sherman has created a crisply paced thriller culled from a series of his online postings over two years. Remarkably, he has smoothly married together these posts into a work that should capably hold readers’ attention. It is a visceral novel, as he recounts in graphic detail the grisly, life-and-death struggles of the NIU students, a majority of whom don’t survive. In his author’s note, Sherman admits to being a video game fan, and this tale feels like one, with a similarly high body count. But characterization is a shortcoming, as, other than Nate, the players aren’t three-dimensional enough for readers to become invested in them. The reasons most of these students willingly inject themselves into this setting aren’t made clear. Still, it’s possible to ride along on the frenetic action and enjoy the violent world that the author has developed.
An engaging thriller with an academic setting that readers wouldn’t want to be caught dead in.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5450-1823-1
Page Count: 238
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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