This solid actioner with heart follows in the tank treads of a well-worn genre.
Two decades after the collapse of civilization, two resourceful survivalists try to protect a new city-state persevering in a savage future dark age.
“The end had not come as one defining gestalt moment; rather it had come as a slight change in the wind” begins Catlin’s post-apocalypse action debut. In the not-too-distant future, a combination of factors—climate change, resource and food depletion, wealth inequality, plagues, and, finally, wars—has destroyed organized society. Twenty-two years later, in the remains of California, Thomas Wolf, a savvy survivalist roaming the urban wastelands haunted by predator gangs and cloistered holdouts, finds a natural ally in Allen Damewood, another gentleman warrior with helpful talents in weaponry and technology. They set up housekeeping in a fortresslike dwelling where Wolf’s armaments include a thoroughly armored, weaponized, and computerized airport-facilities vehicle dubbed the Rig. The two imagine themselves isolated among roving packs of enemies and small, subsistence-level colonies. They are thus amazed when a reconnaissance helicopter crashes nearby. Though the crew perished, the copter seems to come from an advanced and functional human settlement somehow rising from the ashes nearby, and the two men take the Rig to investigate. Indeed, they do discover the future equivalent of an impossible Shangri-La. But they also encounter a deadly threat to the stronghold. The rest of the series opener turns into a fairly exciting battle, enough to keep pages turning. Catlin breaks little new ground in the “prepper” military-Armageddon genre, but he tells the muscular story well, with a couple of likable and smart bromantic leads—think Butch and Sundance with RPGs, battleground strategy, and combat software moxie. In some quiet spaces, characters persuasively lament the tragic yielding of community and goodwill to barbarism and total war, a cautionary tale for contemporary readers. The Rig itself is a cool creation, if a bit of a deus ex machina in the most literal sense. In addition, a ravishing redhead in the oasis is predictably available for Wolf. Enough loose ends hint at sequel possibilities, although this rousing volume can be read as a stand-alone.
This solid actioner with heart follows in the tank treads of a well-worn genre.Pub Date: May 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-79267-4
Page Count: 607
Publisher: Out Reach Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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