by D. J. Knedgen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 23, 2013
An intriguing ride through the bumpy landscape of U.S. politics, with a healthy dose of deception and corruption.
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An action-packed political thriller that rotates between multiple characters and their dark, dangerous worlds.
In Knedgen’s debut novel, U.S. politics are a means to achieve world domination by any means necessary. This includes drugging a young woman named Kim into wooing high-level politicians into bed, where she ultimately kills them. The goal is to eliminate the competition so that the power-hungry overlords win the presidential election and commence their reign of control through the media, in wars, regulations and more. However, the drugs’ effects start to wear off, and memories of Kim’s victims begin to haunt her. The impact of these flashbacks debilitates Kim and causes her to question everything. If it weren’t for Street and Angie, who help her put the pieces of the puzzle together, Kim would be lost for good. These intriguing, well-developed characters have a surprising number of layers to them. In particular, Street, who spends his days hustling on the street corner, works hard to maintain his tough facade, but his soft underbelly reveals itself when it comes to his Grandma Mae. After listening to Street’s conversation with his grandma over the phone, Angie and Kim “saw him in a new light. Kim couldn’t resist.” “Keep that to yourself,” Street says. “Can’t have my image being ruined.” However, the depth of conspiracy in the political turmoil can be hard to digest since there are an implausible number of bad guys with corrupt agendas. In addition, the story is at times unnecessarily violent. In the first chapter, for example, a brutal scene of a woman being attacked is foisted upon the reader. While the blunt impact of this opening was perhaps meant to act as a lure, it ultimately feels more like an assault on the senses.
An intriguing ride through the bumpy landscape of U.S. politics, with a healthy dose of deception and corruption.Pub Date: March 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482634754
Page Count: 250
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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