A fast-paced conspiracy thriller that will please those who agree with its sentiments.
In this first installment of a trilogy, a country boy from Colorado and a spunky girl from Silicon Valley team up to take on a shadowy agency with agents in every branch of the U.S. government.
Seventeen-year-old Gabe Anderson comes across a video on YouTube of a young man spouting seemingly crazy conspiracy theories—including one known only as “the plan.” Gabe’s interest is piqued, and when he learns that the young man, Franklin Williams, apparently committed suicide after shooting up a school, he becomes even more intrigued, wondering if there is truth to Franklin’s paranoid words. Gabe confides in his friend (and crush) Hanna Jamison, and they begin to investigate whether Franklin was actually a crazy killer or someone who was eliminated for knowing too much. However, the people apparently responsible for Franklin’s death soon come after them as well, determined to halt their quest in its tracks. The agency has infiltrated all levels of the government, and it’s powerful enough to orchestrate tragedies to obtain public support for laws it wants to push forward. After a brush with death, Gabe and Hanna flee across the country to join forces with Franklin’s younger sister, Sophi, currently hiding out in a safe-room that her secret-agent father built to protect his family. Together, the three kids vow to halt the agency in its tracks before more people die. Debut author Woods immediately launches his characters into the depths of the story and keeps things moving at a quick clip—indeed, there’s never a dull moment. The book’s astonishing paranoia and staunch pro-gun stance, though, may make some readers uneasy, especially when characters launch into speeches, as when Sophi tells of her father saying “that guns are…for our defense against criminals and being overcome by a power hungry government. I finally see that if we didn’t have guns for protection, only bad people would have them; and they’d make us do whatever they wanted.” However, others will eat this story up, and quickly.
A fast-paced conspiracy thriller that will please those who agree with its sentiments.Pub Date: March 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5232-9696-5
Page Count: 244
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
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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