by Christopher Lassiter ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A garbled and bewildering metafictional tale.
In this debut novella, Lassiter tells a tale of a family seeking to change the world with a great speech.
A playful narrator, known as Mwalimu, has a story for the reader that only takes 20 minutes to tell. Lee and Net are gifted youngsters growing up in a society structured around a rigid class system. One night, as Lee, “the smartest kid on the block,” is sitting in his favorite tree, he overhears his 11-year-old neighbor, Net, practicing a speech that she’s been writing about the injustice of the status quo. “ ‘I,’ Net said proudly beginning her speech without warning, ‘supreme court ruler of all the rules in all the land will make all the people happy all the time and never cry, be treated mean, or….’ ” Lee immediately wants to be friends with this girl, and after a number of years, their friendship blossoms into love. They eventually have two children together: a daughter, Meka, and a son, Hebid. Lee and Net attempt to raise them to be politically progressive and well-rounded, but the wider society threatens to corrupt and destroy the family. Lee tells Net that it’s time for the world to hear the speech she’s been writing her entire life, but in order to deliver it, she will need help from Meka and Hebid (and Mwalimu, as well). The novella is loaded with unusual, metafictional flourishes, with Mwalimu regularly admonishing the reader to listen to the story and counting down minutes. The text—presented, inadvisably, in the Comic Sans typeface—occasionally changes color, and the narrator throws in words from other languages and alphabets. The prose, however, is confusing to read, due in part to awkward syntax: “The two grew up in a familiar place as you. With similar lives. Lee’s family had not, before him, been able to cross the levels of communication.” The author never clearly establishes the setting or the rules of the world, and much of what the characters discuss remains unclear. Mwalimu’s narrative tone implies that some great joke is taking place, but it never reveals to the reader what it is.
A garbled and bewildering metafictional tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Lassiter and Company Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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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Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
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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