An entertaining, well-realized portrait of life at the bottom of the food chain.
Nature overwhelms mankind in this engrossing eco-nightmare.
One day in the near future, long-suffering animals turn on their human oppressors. Bears and cougars run amok; man-eating rats pour out of the sewers; wasps and ants swarm the slow-of-foot; an “elite corps” of raccoons targets infants in the crib and pets everywhere leap for their masters’ throats. This doomsday scenario is too cute to be truly alarming–“[t]he squirrel growled, then bit a chunk out of Brad’s nose with teeth designed to crush walnuts”–but in this first volume of a planned trilogy, Matthews constructs a vividly imagined saga of post-apocalyptic civilization-building. Ten years later, humanity struggles to maintain isolated settlements, bartering for vital scraps of technology salvaged from the ruins, including Compton Pit, an underground complex in British Columbia powered by renewables and defended by animal-repelling ultrasonic noise generators. The Pit is led by solar-energy whiz Noah; outwardly-tough-but-inwardly-fragile security head Darcy; one-armed chief hunter Toffee, more feral than the beasts he kills; and the visionary Boss, who takes them to Vancouver–now a stronghold of crazed orca-worshippers–to find a trove of photovoltaic cells. Their culture is a hard-scrabble inversion of the current model of pampered material excess, as they scrimp for scarce food, clothing and medicines, carefully ration electricity and water and scour the Pacific Northwest for irreplaceable truck parts and electronics components, ever vigilant of the ceaseless attacks of animals and human raiders. Though the bloated narrative affords the characters too much time to ruminate, the interplay of gritty survivalism and rapid-fire action yields a page-turner, throughout which the author has also deftly woven themes of environmentalism and conservation.
An entertaining, well-realized portrait of life at the bottom of the food chain.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2005
ISBN: 81-88811-21-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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