A gripping, macabre action story only occasionally marred by slow spots.
When a Mayan god threatens to wreak havoc on Earth, a young man and his friends must confront their shared destiny.
Young Juan Guerrero has a fighting spirit inside him that he calls his Wolf. His grandfather Manuel was teaching him how to use his powers, but when an armed gang, including several odd members completely covered in black robes, came to the Guerrero’s small village in Mexico and murdered Manuel, Juan’s Wolf took charge of his body. When the dust cleared, most of the gang was dead, the rest were on the run and Juan was in a jail cell. Dr. Gottschalk, an archaeologist at a nearby temple complex to which Juan’s family had a longstanding connection, bails Juan out after he agrees to act as a sort of bodyguard to the doctor’s son Mark. Juan and Mark develop a close friendship, one so close that it is barely threatened by the appearance of Kat O’Riley, a spirited graduate student working at the site. Soon, Mark and Juan have intense feelings for Kat and she for them, but this doesn’t sit well with Mark’s mother, who has plans for her son and Eleanor, a grad student who has had her eye on Mark for some time. Meanwhile, bad things are happening in and around the site, things that seem to hint at a deeper destiny for Mark, Kat and Juan, as well as Juan’s Wolf. Talon’s novel is steeped in a deliciously dark supernatural atmosphere and full of tense action sequences intercut with scenes of lighthearted youthful palling around. While some expository sequences belong on the cutting room floor, for the most part the plot is compelling enough to keep the reader interested. Some of the youthful banter feels forced, but there is more than enough well-wrought action and wonderful creepiness to counteract the rough bits.
A gripping, macabre action story only occasionally marred by slow spots.Pub Date: April 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1450760072
Page Count: 413
Publisher: David Talon
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2011
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
