by Anne Cwyk ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2018
A clever and often entertaining read that’s also disappointingly brief.
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In Cwyk’s (Animals From Another Planet, 2016) sci-fi/fantasy story, a Minnesota high school girl becomes a time traveler.
Nadia Bray meets her friend Kogley in a coffee shop. They’re both fairly typical 11th graders, but Kogley is also “something of an archaeologist.” He shows Nadia artifacts he’s excavated that he believes are from an advanced civilization. Inventor Elmer Pollard, a friend of Kogley’s father’s, thinks that the objects might have come from the future; he’s nearly finished his own time-travel invention, which requires a traveler to wear a ring with a sundial on it and juggle three spheres representing the past, present, and future. This makes Nadia an ideal candidate, as juggling is one of her hobbies. Soon, the invention successfully transports Nadia to the distant future, although the sundial ring mysteriously vanishes from her hand. The future humans are friendly and even have time-traveling devices of their own, “when-cyclopedias,” which merely require pushing a button. But it turns out that time is circular, and the future society is reverting to a prehistoric state. Nadia later winds up in the Middle Ages, but her adventure soon leads her to a mythical land with giants and dragons. The narrative primarily consists of Nadia’s journal excerpts, with periodic interruptions by a third-person narrator. It’s a surprisingly tight structure; for example, Cwyk thoroughly details Elmer’s invention without decelerating the speedy tempo, and she never dawdles while Nadia adjusts to new surroundings. Nevertheless, Nadia’s extraordinary expedition may be too ambitious for such a short book; for example, the novel would have benefited from more specific detail regarding the future world’s “innovative architecture” and “fascinating customs.” Moreover, both the future world and the mythical land have enough potential to carry novels of their own. However, Cwyk does open the possibility for sequels, setting up Nadia and a few of her peers for future time-travel “missions.”
A clever and often entertaining read that’s also disappointingly brief.Pub Date: May 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-981098-84-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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