by D. L. Farrar ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2014
Christian cyberpunk sci-fi—quite a start.
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In a corporate-controlled future from which religion has been purged, inventor Troy Vincent is condemned to a virtual-reality punishment (and likely execution) over accusations that he murdered a business rival.
Farrar’s debut novel kicks off his Christian-oriented sci-fi series taking place in a 22nd-century world where, governments and political parties having failed, giant corporations control (i.e., “sponsor”) a society battered by global warming and unrest. As a result, religion has largely been suppressed—its existence is bad for business, evidently; this is not a sentiment one expects in the American evangelical realm—and criminal justice is downsized to a kind of twist on the medieval notion of trial by ordeal. The accused are placed into virtual-reality pods, where they are assailed by “demons” of their own making—bad conscience for the guilty, regret for the innocent. Demons create manifestations that effectively kill their humans, both in cyberspace and reality. Inventor Troy Vincent is condemned to a Virtual Reality Chamber on trumped-up charges he murdered Hoy SamWong, a ruthless tycoon who caused Troy’s father’s death and stole Troy’s company and his wife. Paradoxically, the beautiful Lovena Baptista, daughter of another of Hoy SamWong’s ex-partners, is also being tormented in a VRC for the identical crime. The duo’s potential savior (besides, of course, the Savior) is Vincent—a shape-shifting android devised by Troy’s father with Vincent family DNA—who is kept around by the heartless corporations as a sort of attending executioner (for some reason, the bad guys don’t anticipate this becoming a problem). Spock-like Vincent, with a crusader’s cross emblazoned on his breastplate, is a most intriguing blend of old and new. Less successful are the title entities, Grief Masters, helpful VR visitors who bear names such as Courage and Faith and appear to the embattled Troy and Lovena during their cliffhanger perils in fantasy digital environments. Are they angels? Saints? Their literalist intercessions take the narrative from cyberpunk to The Shack, although Farrar maintains a brisk and fairly exciting (holy) roller-coaster momentum throughout.
Christian cyberpunk sci-fi—quite a start.Pub Date: June 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1458214447
Page Count: 276
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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