A breakneck historical thriller.
In Lee’s debut World War II thriller, a young agent infiltrates the Japanese atomic bomb program.
Mina Sakamoto, code-named Coral Hare, is no ordinary teenage girl. Born and raised in Honolulu, she learns medicine from her father, a doctor, and also becomes proficient in several languages. Her life is changed forever on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and Mina’s beloved father is killed. As a skilled Japanese-American linguist, she’s uniquely suited to join the U.S. government’s Office of Strategic Services—first as a translator and later as a spy posing as a young nurse. After three years of fieldwork in Asia, Mina is already battle-hardened at the age of 17, but her greatest test is yet to come. Japan is making dangerous progress in its atomic bomb program, so Mina must travel behind enemy lines to Tokyo and mark an atomic facility for destruction. In the process, she encounters Col. Tetsuo Matsui of the Imperial Japanese Army, the man in charge of the program who’s also known as the Butcher of Bataan; she gains his eternal enmity by causing the firebombing of Tokyo. From Japan to northern Korea to Borneo, Mina witnesses horrifying violence and leaves a trail of bloody destruction as she races to stop Japan from building an A-bomb and dropping it on the United States. With her Japanese schoolgirl uniform, arsenal of weapons and exclamations such as “Aloha, bitches!,” Mina seems more suited to the graphic-novel or comic-book format; so do the secondary characters, as the good guys are all good, and the bad guys are all bad. However, even if this thriller seems a little too enamored of its own protagonist, it moves at a whirlwind pace. Every time it seems that Mina is about to catch a break and wrap up her adventures, another crisis sends her back out in the field, regardless of her life-threatening injuries. The story also delivers a submarine chase, a Tommy-gun–wielding priest and even a shark attack.
A breakneck historical thriller.Pub Date: March 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9914800-0-5
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Caleb Lee
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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