An inventive effort, although too erratic.
Hoffman’s fantasy, sci-fi and time-travel mashup.
Ellie MacReady is 17 years old when she ventures to her first Market—a fantastical bazaar—despite her father’s warning of its potential risks. The Market comes once in a century for only three days. Expecting a marriage proposal from her boyfriend, Joshua, Ellie is content with her life yet curious about the mysterious, mythical Market. When it arrives, she eagerly enters an enchanting world of marvel and delight where she meets the Prince. He whisks her away from Joshua and her family, marries her and gives her a necklace that supposedly protects her. The necklace, however, really controls her and contributes to her misery. At first, the storytelling is exceptional; the tale begins with so much promise, but it spirals into confusion. The book is divided by each Market instead of by chapters. During the second Market, Ellie loses track of the Prince while she runs an errand, and the Market leaves without her. Thus begins her centuries-long hunt for her master. The main hindrance to the story is the incredible, overwhelming span of time. It begins in 1726 and concludes in 2260. When Ellie discovers that the Prince has married someone else, she seethes with rage. Ellie’s fury toward the Prince drives the majority of the novel, which becomes tiresome. Hoffman throws everything imaginable into his story: magic, cloning, time travel, dragons, weaponry, beastly creatures, futuristic science. The prose shines, but the story is so convoluted that it’s a struggle to appreciate it. Ellie seeks revenge on the Prince and pursues her freedom; however, there are a lot of unanswered questions and too few explanations. Perhaps they will be addressed in the planned sequel. Repeatedly, we learn how special the Market is, but the clutter of characters, creatures and centuries diminishes its impact.
An inventive effort, although too erratic.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0988595903
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Ohbalto Media LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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