Blanchard (The Breathtaker, 2003, etc.) is just a bit long-winded in two or three scenes, but his characters are...
In what could be Blanchard’s breakout, a man strives to end a deadly disease by murdering all who carry it.
Heartbreaking, invariably fatal, Stier-Zellar’s attacks the young, and Daisy Hubbard has lost a six-year-old brother to the disease, which goes a long way toward explaining her choice of career. Daisy, a genetic researcher, is convinced that one day her work will earn her, among other prizes, the Nobel, as well as the self-validation that comes with eliminating a merciless child-killer. So Daisy’s a brain, and it’s entirely possible her sister Anna, three years younger, might be recognized as one, too, if she weren’t so flaky. Anna creates uproar—that’s her history. Among other stunts, she vanishes from time to time. Burrowed down, then, in her exhaustively demanding Boston lab, Daisy is not eager to drop everything and take off to California to search for Anna. But she goes anyway, persuaded by her mother that this disappearance signals something truly ominous. Her mother’s right. Turns out that Anna is one of three De Campo Beach residents to go missing, and LAPD detective Jack Makowsky has begun to think it might be the work of a serial killer. Nice guy that he is—and smitten besides—he tries to hide that from Daisy, but he can’t. By this time, Roy Gaines—smart, manipulative, hopelessly demented, a kind of minor-league Hannibal Lector—has entered the picture. Slowly, the shaken Daisy begins to understand what might have happened to her sister. What she has yet to comprehend is the secret she shares with a remorseless sociopath.
Blanchard (The Breathtaker, 2003, etc.) is just a bit long-winded in two or three scenes, but his characters are exceptionally strong and his plotting is sure-footed.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-57672-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
With this book, Saunders asserts a complex and disturbing vision in which society and cosmos blur.
Short-story virtuoso Saunders' (Tenth of December, 2013, etc.) first novel is an exhilarating change of pace.
The bardo is a key concept of Tibetan Buddhism: a middle, or liminal, spiritual landscape where we are sent between physical lives. It's also a fitting master metaphor for Saunders’ first novel, which is about suspension: historical, personal, familial, and otherwise. The Lincoln of the title is our 16th president, sort of, although he is not yet dead. Rather, he is in a despair so deep it cannot be called mere mourning over his 11-year-old son, Willie, who died of typhoid in 1862. Saunders deftly interweaves historical accounts with his own fragmentary, multivoiced narration as young Willie is visited in the netherworld by his father, who somehow manages to bridge the gap between the living and the dead, at least temporarily. But the sneaky brilliance of the book is in the way Saunders uses these encounters—not so much to excavate an individual’s sense of loss as to connect it to a more national state of disarray. 1862, after all, was the height of the Civil War, when the outcome was far from assured. Lincoln was widely seen as being out of his depth, “a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.” Among Saunders’ most essential insights is that, in his grief over Willie, Lincoln began to develop a hard-edged empathy, out of which he decided that “the swiftest halt to the [war] (therefore the greatest mercy) might be the bloodiest.” This is a hard truth, insisting that brutality now might save lives later, and it gives this novel a bitter moral edge. For those familiar with Saunders’ astonishing short fiction, such complexity is hardly unexpected, although this book is a departure for him stylistically and formally; longer, yes, but also more of a collage, a convocation of voices that overlap and argue, enlarging the scope of the narrative. It is also ruthless and relentless in its evocation not only of Lincoln and his quandary, but also of the tenuous existential state shared by all of us. Lincoln, after all, has become a shade now, like all the ghosts who populate this book. “Strange, isn’t it?” one character reflects. “To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labors utterly forgotten?”
With this book, Saunders asserts a complex and disturbing vision in which society and cosmos blur.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9534-3
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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