A funny and thoughtful portrayal of the not-too-distant future.
A town’s residents battle over the last piece of valuable property in this novel.
In 2027, Emily Cooper feels drawn to Breckenridge, Colorado—beckoned there by elliptical dreams. She finds old letters written by her grandfather, Isaiah Copper, claiming that he hid a valuable nugget of gold in a chapel that he built in the town years ago. After attending art school in Rhode Island—she makes Japanese pottery—she moved to New York City, but she couldn’t get accustomed to metropolitan life. Now she dreams of buying the chapel and using it as an art studio. However, she discovers that the land upon which the chapel is built is worth millions, and nearly everyone in Breckenridge seems to have an eye on it. William Janis, the chapel’s rector, wants to build a high-tech, modern church facility, and Mayor Ladd teams up with a shady real estate developer looking to build a ski resort. Prescott “Hucker” Anderson, the owner of a high-priced home for the elderly, aims to use the property to open a hospice, hoping that a permissive euthanasia law will allow more rapid turnover of aging clients. However, Al Holland, who owns the property, is indifferent to wealth; he’s more interested in the health of the community. He immediately takes a shine to Emily, who moves into the chapel—making her a target. Author Champorcher (The Vatican Strategy, 2014, etc.) delivers a lighthearted but action-packed thriller. He has a particular talent for seamlessly combining comical high jinks with violent drama: sometimes Emily’s life is threatened, and at other times, she’s making wisecracks to her new sidekick, Stephen “Bear” Chen, a once-successful musician who now refuses to play in front of large groups. Also, with its futuristic tale, the novel inventively captures a world that’s dominated by a sizable elderly population—the direct result of advances in medical science. However, the plot eventually becomes taxingly complicated, and a subplot involving Buddhist monks and reincarnation is simply gratuitous.
A funny and thoughtful portrayal of the not-too-distant future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-974611-58-4
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2017
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
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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