A triumph thanks to its impressive snowy setting; should be read with a space heater handy.
A former U.S. government agent faces off against Russian operatives who may be planning a nuclear attack in Alaska in Ceroni’s (Meridian, 2000) thriller.
Ex–FBI agent Dave McClure leaves his Colorado home for Alaska. He hopes a wintry November trek will help him through the pain of losing his wife and son in a car collision a year earlier. But withstanding the cold takes a back seat when McClure finds a body in the snow. Nearby is the murderers’ campsite, and McClure recognizes the men’s weapons and dialect as Russian. They clearly have a mission planned, one that McClure aims to stop. Meanwhile, Mossad agents Raphael Mahler and Meira Dantzig team up with the CIA in America, surmising that the Russians will try to steal a nuclear warhead. The protagonist and Alaskan locale make a winning combo. McClure, for example, isn’t just up against Russian baddies, but a blizzard and a couple of grizzlies as well. His survival skills, like using snow for drinking water, become second nature to the narrative. But the best scenes are of McClure in operative mode: he spies on the Russians to gather intel; sneaks into their campsite to steal a bit of food and sever their means of communication; and is well-prepared for inevitable confrontations against the armed men. At the same time, Raphael and Meira lead a story that feels completely separate from McClure’s, even if the plots ultimately intersect. The Mossad agents spend much of their time guessing at what the Russians and Iranians are up to. These scenes, while never boring, lack tension since readers know more than the agents do. Their subplots gain traction once they connect with McClure’s CIA pal Pete Novak, especially as a romance brews between Raphael and Meira. If nothing else, sequences involving the U.S. and Mossad agents making their ways to Alaska are reprieves from the much more exhilarating moments with McClure. He’s a character who could have carried the story all on his own with only his intuition. And maybe a few guns.
A triumph thanks to its impressive snowy setting; should be read with a space heater handy.Pub Date: March 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1478744573
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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