by Alan Osi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2016
A story that’s as messy and colorful as a drug trip.
In this debut novel, the first of a series, told from a variety of shifting viewpoints, a new drug allows people to experience the lives of others.
New York Globe reporter Maxwell Smith longs for a big story that will make him famous. He finds it while taking a walk with his girlfriend, Justine, when a strange man calling himself “a messenger” hands him a baggie full of powder. It’s called “moondust,” he says with a zealot’s fervor, which he claims brings its users closer to God. It turns out that when one drops some of the powder into his or her eye, one is instantly transported into the mind and body of another person from a wide variety of times and places across history—whether it be a whaler in the Azores or a soldier in the trenches of World War I. Justine’s faith is shaken by this discovery, while Maxwell delves deep into New York’s drug-fueled underworld to discover the origins of moondust and write a story about it. This leads him to a gang of “stoners” that includes hip DJ Percival and artsy bombshell Hailey—the makers of moondust who face threats to their enterprise on all sides. The story builds to a big party in which moondust will be revealed to the world for what it actually is—if everything goes according to plan. Osi fills his story with far too many first-person narrators, the majority of whom are indistinguishable from one another due to their tendency to speak in similar shades of purple prose. The worst culprit is Maxwell, who spouts lines such as, “I needed to go into the bleeding heart of the thing, to scrape its arteries and tattoo its blood across the front of America’s newspapers” and “the old libido was a Minotaur in a maze, demanding steady diet.” Fortunately, the concept of moondust is intriguing enough to keep readers turning pages, while the story’s New York setting, dense with insider details about the city’s people and places, shines brighter than any member of the sprawling cast of characters.
A story that’s as messy and colorful as a drug trip.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Cleveland Writers Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Robinne Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2017
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.
When Solène Marchand takes her 12-year-old daughter to a concert by the hottest boy band on the planet, she doesn't expect to fall in love with one of the singers.
Middle-aged art gallery owner Solène hasn’t dated since her divorce, but when her ex-husband buys their daughter and a group of her friends tickets to Vegas and a backstage concert experience, then backs out at the last minute, she steps in as escort. The five guys in the wildly popular English boy band August Moon appeal to women of all ages, but Hayes, the brains behind the group’s success, flirts with Solène at the concert meet and greet, invites them to a party after the show, then pursues her once she gets back to Los Angeles. He’s only 20 and he’s incredibly famous; his attention is flattering and heady. The two fall into an affair that’s supposed to be light and easy, but before long they can’t ignore their intense emotional attachment. Solène is hesitant to tell her daughter, but when she procrastinates, Isabelle learns about it through an online tabloid, which damages their relationship and leaves Solène open to censure from her ex. Then, once the affair goes viral, she experiences the darker side of Hayes’ fan base. What started out as a jaunty adventure turns into an emotionally fraught journey, and Solène must decide what she’s willing to risk for her happiness and what she won’t risk for her daughter’s. Actress Lee, who appeared in Fifty Shades Darker, debuts with a beautifully written novel that explores sex, love, romance, and fantasy in moving, insightful ways while also examining a woman’s struggle with aging and sexism, with a nod at the tension between celebrity and privacy.
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12590-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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