A grisly thriller that will satisfy fans of serial killers, though it might mislead readers into thinking it’s a YA novel...
In Eve’s dark debut, 16-year-old Cosette Hugo finds herself the victim of a high school bully, but after she kills her bully’s rapist and is wracked with guilt, she decides that the best way to die is to get herself killed.
Cosette doesn’t like her life. She lives with her mom in a beige apartment, her dad and his new trophy wife ignore her, her war hero brother was killed in a car accident, and a bully, Hilda, is making her life miserable. Cosette doesn’t think she’s attractive, strong, or confident; that’s nothing, however, compared with how she feels after she stumbles across Hilda being sexually assaulted one night. In a flood of adrenaline, Cosette scares away two of the attackers and kills the third. Afterward, she feels so guilty that she considers suicide, but she decides it would hurt her friends and family too much. So Cosette formulates a plan: she’ll find one or both of Hilda’s remaining attackers and let them kill her. At least, that’s the plan until she accidentally runs into a drug addict who attacks her, and Cosette kicks him to death. After murdering twice, Cosette is apparently hooked; she stumbles into one dangerous situation after another, but instead of feeling weak and afraid, she begins slitting throats and chopping up bodies. Eve is a strong writer whose prose makes it easy to get sucked in, yet the plot may turn some readers off. What appears to be a story about bullying and teen suicide takes an abrupt (at times, not wholly believable) left turn when Cosette becomes a psychotic vigilante serial killer who gets sexually aroused by murder. When she says things like, “He holds my neck and clenches my hair, forcing me to bend to his demands. It’s painful and violent. And I love it,” it feels as if two types of books—YA about bullying and depression and thriller in the vein of Dexter or Fifty Shades of Grey—are warring for dominance. The two halves don’t entirely fit together.
A grisly thriller that will satisfy fans of serial killers, though it might mislead readers into thinking it’s a YA novel when it decidedly is not.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1942366027
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Spikenard Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 2, 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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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