by Damien Lutz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 2019
A complex work that offers an intense look at a possible future.
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An ambitious SF novel about climate change and technology addiction.
In 2039 Japan, Yoshi Goto is starting a new job as a shopping mall Santa Claus. Two years ago, he was the lead in the highly anticipated film One Man Dreaming, but he was so difficult to work with that the Santa gig is the only one he can get to prove that he’s reliable. After accidentally knocking down a child and crashing the sleigh into a Christmas tree, Yoshi is not only fired on the spot—he’s also facing a potential lawsuit. As he walks home in the rain, a driverless “smart car” pulls alongside him with an automated message telling him that the CEO of Maya Technologies, Tyler Gray, wants to meet with him. Gray is going to use his new technology, the Maya Lenz, to create an immersive virtual environment where people can relive their favorite parts of movies, enjoy role-playing games, and more. One of the main features of the new Maya District is that it will feature the main character from One Man Dreaming. All Yoshi has to do is spend a few weeks acting like his character, so that Maya’s computers can learn how to be like him. But as Yoshi explores the outside world with and without his new Lenz, he discovers that there’s more to the city, and the people in it, than he ever imagined. Lutz (Amanojaku, 2016, etc.) has created a compelling future world that’s not very much unlike our own. The effects of climate change, for example, are shown to be very real, causing massive changes to Japan’s coastlines, and its citizens are clearly hiding behind technology to escape this terrible reality. The only way in which the book falls a bit flat is in how it focuses on the worldbuilding—and on cool new gadgets—to such an extent that it takes too long to get to the heart of the story. At times, so much is thrown at readers that it may be difficult for them to care enough about particular characters or plot points that prove important later.
A complex work that offers an intense look at a possible future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9946275-5-1
Page Count: 466
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Damien Lutz
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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