A complex tale of the end times with skillful worldbuilding.
This dramatic Christian fantasy novel, set after the rapture, alternates between heaven and Earth to tell a story of the battle for the souls of humanity.
The well-known prophecy of the second coming of Jesus Christ gets a completely new twist in this text, which follows multiple groups of characters. First, the author pulls back the curtain on Harem, the realm of angels who plan to rescue “the righteous” in an invasion of Earth that humans will perceive as a mass alien abduction. Later, brilliant but nonbelieving medical researchers Yvette Milagro and Wen “Winnie” Chow Lee, along with Yvette’s 10-year-old daughter, Mia, wake up and find the injured Hoshea (aka Jesus) when the rapture occurs. The story bounces between Harem and Earth with additional subplots that follow 13-year-old Artemis and her family, who are raptured in North Carolina and begin the process of becoming full-fledged angels, as well as the first rumbles of the Antichrist coming to power. Meanwhile, a New York City police detective named Reynolds and National Security Agency operative Akachi Ihejika pursue the researchers and Hoshea in the post-rapture world. Readers of high fantasy will recognize the in-depth worldbuilding in debut author Perez’s descriptions of the technology and mystical powers of Harem, which include time- and space-traveling devices and celestial weaponry for fighting the Helem, or demons. The journey of the humans in Harem is particularly compelling, drawing out deep philosophical insights. The dialogue-driven story focuses on how demonstrations of love are capable of changing hearts, but at its core, it aims to offer nothing less than a tale of an epic struggle between good and evil. This Christian novel showcases human emotions and sacrifice without preaching or out-of-place spirituality; even divine beings are portrayed as experiencing something new during this era of history. The novel is also action-packed, offering harrowing helicopter travel, devilish enemies, and gut-wrenching losses of innocence. The author helpfully outlines the dizzying array of characters in a “Character Key” at the end, and the story clearly hints at a sequel.
A complex tale of the end times with skillful worldbuilding.Pub Date: March 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73217-180-0
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Aristo's Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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