A lovingly designed metafictional sendup of genre novels.
A debut metafictional fantasy tells the story of a private investigator plucked out of his own book.
Joe Slade is the prototypical hard-boiled detective: street-smart, tough, wisecracking, and jaded. He’s attempting to solve his latest case when three strangers—emphasis on strange—step in and solve it for him. They seem to know everything about him, in fact. He agrees to go with them to their hideout to discuss a proposition they have for him. That’s when things get really weird: Time and space begin to warp, and he ends up in an impossibly large library filled with an infinite number of books. Even some volumes about himself. Joe Slade, they tell him, is the main character in a series of detective novels by an author named Ben Westing. These strangers—who turn out to be a wizard, an elf, and a dwarf—are characters in a fantasy novel by an author named Howard Zagny. “You’ve already seen we are able to escape from our own book,” the wizard tells Joe. “With your help, we will escape from all books. We’ll go there. To the world where the books are written. There we will confront our authors and live lives that we will write with our own hands.” What follows is their escapade across genres—romance, sci-fi, horror, and more—to literally meet their makers. Along the way, Joe has the opportunity to defy the tropes he’s been shackled with and find out just what sort of hero he really is. Sharp writes in a mercurial prose that morphs to fit each genre the characters travel through. He finds creative ways to portray these metafictional shifts, as here, when the narration switches from Joe’s first-person perspective to the third person: “Joe could not shake an unnameable strangeness that had settled upon him. His thoughts seemed more distant, less audible within his own mind. It was as though some kind of mental fog had settled upon his consciousness and would not relinquish its grip.” The book is clever, amusing, surprising, and genuinely fun: an old-time adventure that will keep readers on their toes while leaving the door open for any and all possibilities.
A lovingly designed metafictional sendup of genre novels.Pub Date: May 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71953-015-6
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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