A promising thriller with a provocative premise, but one that lets the cat out of the bag a bit too early.
In Waldron’s (Lion’s Head Deception, 2013, etc.) conspiracy thriller, a power-hungry businessman hatches a plot to institute martial law in Toronto, and the only people who can stop him are a blogger, a reporter, and a cameraman.
Blogger Matt Tremain stumbles upon the story of a lifetime when a source tips him off to the nefarious master plan behind CleanSweep, an all-encompassing surveillance program that’s been granted unprecedented freedom to monitor everyone in the city of Toronto in the aftermath of recent riots. It turns out that CleanSweep CEO Charles Claussen intends to capture what he deems to be the most undesirable members of society—including homeless people, ex-convicts, and members of the LGBT community—and pack them off to labor camps. His grandfather, he says to his friends at one point, “was an engineer for Hitler, and proud to have helped design many of the camps” who “offered advice on how to avoid the pitfalls, the mistakes both Hitler and Stalin made.” The novel’s greatest strengths are its evocation of the political climate of World War II and its resonance with more recent cultural debates, such as Edward Snowden’s revelations about global surveillance and the rise of far-right politics worldwide. Yet the story loses steam early on, as the heroes uncover Claussen’s diabolical scheme fairly quickly, finding more than enough evidence to attract global attention; one can’t help but wonder why Matt doesn’t promptly notify a major news outlet. Couldn’t his reporter ally, Susan, help him reach out to influencers in the press? “Old-school technology trumps high tech when it comes to avoiding CleanSweep,” one of Matt’s associates informs him, but does it, really? The novel does serve up a number of clandestine coffee shop meetings and anonymous, low-fi cellphone conversations that manage to keep things entertaining, but they mostly serve only to lengthen the story.
A promising thriller with a provocative premise, but one that lets the cat out of the bag a bit too early.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4791-4332-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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