by C.G. Rousing ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2013
An imaginative fantasy stuffed with too many characters and details.
A debut YA novel focuses on a magical land of positive thinking.
Rousing presents Levi Levy: a 15-year old who has received a strange message from something called the Interdimensional Council of Cognition. Levi is invited to attend the Selective Thought Studies Program in Dimension 11. It certainly sounds like a wild idea. Yet Levi doesn’t have a whole lot going for him in Earth’s regular dimension. Perhaps he can become something greater in a new place. Levi is soon transported, thanks to a purple funnel cloud, to a land of magic where he will be in training to become a “thought sifter.” The key throughout his training will be the ability to harness the power of his thoughts. He will even be able to fly in this world if he can train his mind to keep him in the air. Under the gentle watch of a wizardlike man named Hemp, kids like Levi keep thought journals, engage in an aerial sport called Solarshay, and eat veggie burgers at the local diner. But all is not mere fun and games. A figure named Orable has his own set of dastardly plans for up-and-coming thought sifters. Will Orable be successful or can his schemes be halted with the power of positive thinking? Positive thinking is, of course, the whole point here, and it is a theme that is driven home time and again. As Hemp asserts, “Directing your thoughts is the key to, well—everything.” While the message may be obvious, that does not mean the events surrounding it always are. A lot happens in just over 300 pages and it all progresses quickly. Nevertheless, the story can be jumbled at times with additional aspects like enchanted cupcakes, a creature called a “think bug,” and supporting characters of varying interest (take, for instance, Levi’s Yorkshire terrier, who has managed to follow him to Dimension 11 without a whole lot to contribute). But ultimately, the tale is open to any number of tantalizing outcomes. The burning question is: Will Levi be able to direct his mind to choose the right one?
An imaginative fantasy stuffed with too many characters and details.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-71924-5
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Thoughts To Die For Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2019
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 J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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