An aviation page-turner that delivers a diverse and well-developed cast of characters, nonstop action, and unrelenting...
Set in the late 1980s, a debut novel chronicles the unforeseen consequences of an ex-convict’s attempt to hijack a 747 flight from San Francisco to New York City.
Capt. Don Webber, a veteran aviator who has been married for 26 years, is looking forward to piloting a 400-plus–passenger Boeing 747 to JFK airport. It’s not so much the long flight that excites him as it is his scheduled rendezvous with his most recent lover, a sexually adventurous Pan Am flight attendant. But his plans of infidelity are thwarted by an ex-con named Guillermo Villas Guerrero, who has become entangled in an ill-conceived plot to hijack a plane to Cuba. Guerrero has mixed feelings about the scheme (“One moment, he felt the hijacking was going to be a snap, a piece of cake. The next moment he was terrified with recurring and rampant visions of failure. The result of his dreamed failure was always the same. He would fail. He would be caught. He would go back to prison”). Once in the air, he begins unraveling emotionally and eventually takes a cabin attendant hostage with a graphite handgun that he smuggled aboard, forcing his way into the cockpit. The situation devolves quickly from there. This thriller is comparable to the air disaster movies of the ’70s (Airport, Airport 1975, etc.). Stott adeptly creates three-dimensional and believable (albeit a bit stereotypical) characters whose various struggles and motivations help power the story forward. Director of security operations at San Francisco airport Robert Burns and senior dispatcher Frankfurt Lazlo Fielding come alive on the page, giving readers a glimpse into the pressure-packed and bureaucratic nightmare that working with the Federal Aviation Administration can be. Another of the novel’s strengths is paradoxically a weakness as well. The author is highly knowledgeable about aviation, and that expertise initially brings an undeniable authenticity to the story. But there are numerous sequences in which he goes into too much detail (such as explaining a phugoid oscillation curve), and these collectively detract from the tale’s narrative flow and negatively affect the momentum. But these issues have little impact on the overall reading experience.
An aviation page-turner that delivers a diverse and well-developed cast of characters, nonstop action, and unrelenting tension; buckle up and prepare for a wild ride.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-692-29053-8
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Black Thunderbird Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2017
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
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