A nuanced, if sometimes sluggish, meditation on a savior.
Debut author Spellmann offers a sci-fi novel about extraterrestrial interest in a Messiah on Earth.
In the year 5023 B.C., a silver spacecraft from the planet Bigor lands on Earth. The ship is damaged and unable to send out a distress signal. Capt. Aladam, Dr. Evaze, and the rest of the Bigorite crew determine that they may be marooned for some time. What will happen when they come into contact with the native people? Years later, back on Bigor, a man named Toler is to be sent to Earth on a “scientific-cultural mission” to determine the effect of a past “preternatural extraneous intervention” or “PEI”—a man who was planted on Earth some 30 years before. Toler and his companion, a teenager named Sarn, must determine how that man has influenced the local population. Although it seems like a straightforward mission, Toler’s life is threatened almost immediately. Readers soon learn that the PEI in question is none other than Jesus Christ, and, although Toler and Sarn intend just to observe him, there are other Bigorites who would like nothing more than to see the Messiah obliterated. Spellman combines traditional stories of Jesus—such as his casting of demons into swine, from the New Testament—with laser guns and curious aliens in this novel, which makes for a surprising mixture. The story is slow and a bit obvious at the beginning—it doesn’t take much imagination to guess who Aladam and Evaze represent, although it takes a great deal of patience to get through their subplot. Mostly, though, the story hits many thoughtful marks: for example, the alien travelers discuss the nature of Messiahs in general, and Toler guesses that Messiahs launch their careers around the age of 30 because “They’re in between impetuous youth and conservative middle age.” The abundance of characters with retro-sounding sci-fi names, such as Lybur and Derxter, can distract from the more insightful moments. On the whole, though, the story provides intriguing anthropological reflection and outer space adventure.
A nuanced, if sometimes sluggish, meditation on a savior.Pub Date: March 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5245-5737-9
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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