A leisurely opening is mere preparation for the fierce struggle to follow—and it’s more than worth the wait.
A college student’s visions may be effective in a battle against demons in Baldwin’s (Fathers House, 2013) supernatural thriller.
Nineteen-year-old Kallie Hunt has been waking up most mornings with a strange sense of déjà vu. These feelings are so disturbing that she seeks help from the Rev. Johnny Swag. Swag, who belongs to the Alliance of Initiates, a secret subset of the United Religions Organizations, suspects that Kallie is a Rememberer—someone with an ability to see “past life cycles.” The A.I. uses a Rememberer to thwart terrorist attacks before they happen, but one has gone rogue, taunting the A.I. by mutilating the bodies of terrorists that a Rememberer has already killed and leaving behind cryptic messages. The Rogue, however, may be planning something that’s far worse than a potential terrorist strike. The first half of the novel feels muted, consisting mostly of lengthy exposition. But these scenes ultimately prove crucial to the plot, as many delve into weighty concepts such as time-cycles and eternal return—essentially that time is circular and a Rememberer is literally remembering, not necessarily seeing the future. While the first part is restrained, readers will welcome the unleashed latter half, even if it seems to come from nowhere. Characters, for instance, face off against demons, are besieged by demonic possessions, and launch a rescue attempt. Kallie is a fervent protagonist with an intriguing background; she lost her mother to cancer the year before and is estranged from her father. Her relationship with love interest Seth is sufficient if not predictable, but the standout among supporting characters is Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Dennard Bennett. He, like Kallie, has experienced loss—his wife and two daughters died in a plane crash— and watching his progress from investigating a simple murder case to an all-out demon war is, in many ways, more riveting than Kallie’s gradual revelation.
A leisurely opening is mere preparation for the fierce struggle to follow—and it’s more than worth the wait.Pub Date: April 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0692356760
Page Count: -
Publisher: Ink-Stone Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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