by Brian Deason ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2016
A boisterous, persistently fun adventure story.
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A debut fantasy about an Illinois grad student who goes to various places that share more than a few similarities with familiar movies and TV shows.
George Preston is a 27-year-old working on his dissertation in the year 2000. One day, he opens his bathroom door and sees a rainy city outside at street level, despite the fact that his apartment is on the third floor. He soon figures out that the rainy day is in the future, but then, after a short while, someone sticks a gun in his face—and George suddenly wakes up somewhere else. In this new place, he meets Dirk Hendricks and J.P. Ryder, characters from the 1990s sci-fi television series Hidden Agendas, who demand to know what he remembers. Soon, George is dodging bullets, and then he wakes up in yet another universe, stealing treasure with Pistol Kramer, a thrill-seeking adventurer from the movies. George moves from universe to universe in different ways, but wherever he goes, he keeps seeing a familiar man, who may be the only one who can explain what’s happening to him. But the mysterious man isn’t exactly forthcoming; sometimes he’s sympathetic to George’s plight, and other times he’s outright antagonistic. George has no option but to traverse assorted universes and hope for a return to his perfectly normal life. This witty story enjoys parodying recognizable films and TV shows; Hidden Agendas, for example, is an obvious play on The X-Files, complete with a “Gum-chewing Man,” and George later finds himself in a role akin to a certain popular, fictional MI6 agent. Deason layers on smart satire, as well, largely through his protagonist’s self-awareness; for example, George recognizes the innate racism of the Indiana Jones–esque Kramer. The myriad worlds are colorful, with each appearing to George as they would onscreen, such as a 1950s sitcom that’s all in black and white. The likable protagonist, meanwhile, ultimately sees the people he meets as more than just characters, sparking an intriguing question: could one of them cross into George’s world? However, the ending, while emphatically resolving the plot, is familiar from other stories and may be too predictable for some readers.
A boisterous, persistently fun adventure story.Pub Date: July 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5232-2714-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2004
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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