An often engaging thriller that transcends its standard post-apocalyptic setup.
In this debut sci-fi thriller, two English brothers encounter a desolate New York City littered with corpses and teeming with crazed killers.
Manchester, England, natives Harry and Jack cut their New York sightseeing plans short when their plane lands in the apparently abandoned John F. Kennedy International Airport. The brothers, along with fellow passenger Bernie and his wife, Linda, volunteer to check the terminal, where they discover multiple corpses. Soon, a group of seemingly demented people tries to kill them. Several of the attackers—the brothers simply call them “killers”—appear to have turned against one another before the plane’s arrival. Soon the brothers and their allies are on the hunt for more survivors and for information about a possible global catastrophe. The Wearmouths’ vision of an apocalyptic New York is, at least initially, standard fare: large, deserted areas; piles of dead bodies; and main characters with no clue about what’s happening. However, the authors’ ingenuity soon separates their story from the rest of the pack, as it features enemies who aren’t as easy to spot as infected zombies—which makes it impossible for the heroes to trust even an elderly woman. The killers also have the intriguing ability to manipulate potential victims into traps. As the story progresses, the brothers meet other survivors, such as Lea—who, in a clever use of modern communication, initially communicates with Jack via Twitter—and they also lose some companions. The story eventually hits a relative standstill, however, once the group holes up in the city. Readers learn little about the characters or their situations; instead, the heroes simply fight more killers, until they finally opt for a more isolated shelter. The book’s final act delivers the goods, however, explaining the reasons for the killers’ bizarre behavior and why the airplane’s passengers and crew were unaffected. Harry and Jack’s nationality gives the book a distinctive British flair—they often call people “mates,” for example—but it sometimes bleeds too much into the rest of the narrative, as when American characters refer to a cell phone as a “mobile.” The coda provides a fitting denouement, and leaves the ending open to readers’ interpretations.
An often engaging thriller that transcends its standard post-apocalyptic setup.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491296523
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2013
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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