Winsome, sweet, and apocalyptic—a perfect blend for the end of days.
Amber Kivinen is going to Mars! She just has to win a game show first.
Amber and Kevin Watkins have known each other since second grade and have been going out since they were 17. When they left their hometown of Thunder Bay, Ontario, to move to Vancouver, it was supposed to be for brighter horizons—an escape from their oppressive home lives and a chance to pursue their dreams. Ten years later, those dreams seem to have stalled out. Kevin’s ambition to be a screenwriter only lasted one semester in film school, and in spite of her master’s degree in environmental science, Amber is working as a receptionist. To supplement their incomes Amber and Kevin also run a small-scale hydroponic marijuana farm out of their basement apartment and, inevitably, partake fairly heavily of their product. For Kevin this life seems an ideal fit; he is perfectly content to go nowhere as long as he and Amber are “going nowhere together.” Amber, however, who was on track to become an Olympic gymnast before a shoulder injury sidelined her, has nowhere to channel the energy that propelled her to athletic greatness except into a cycle of self-destructive flirtations. That is, until she hears about the MarsNow mission and the attendant game show, a “Survivor-meets-Star-Trek amalgam,” in which the two winners—one man and one woman—will receive one-way tickets to Mars as the first Marsonauts in billionaire tech guru Geoff Task’s settlement. Seemingly against all odds, Amber is chosen to appear on the show; then, as 12 grueling weeks of challenges winnow down the competitors, it becomes a real possibility that she might win, leaving Earth, and Kevin, behind forever. Part disaffected-slacker rom-com, part social satire, part wistful end-of-the-world eulogy for ordinary, unscripted love, this novel veers close to the kind of wearying cynicism and late-stage capitalist master-villainy that would make its conceit feel familiar. Yet again and again the novel saves itself from this fate by the very real hope at the heart of its main characters’ binary orbit around each other—that love may be enough after all; if not to save them, then at least to make sure they will not be forgotten.
Winsome, sweet, and apocalyptic—a perfect blend for the end of days.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780393285918
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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