A meticulously orchestrated genre mashup with an urgent, heartfelt message.
A novel sees a reporter trying to uncover the truth about his planet and its many secret inhabitants.
A’eiio and her husband, E’iouy, are fairies. They’ve been exiled by intergalactic Wardens to a planet where they don flesh suits to hide among the locals. Tonight, they’re attending an award ceremony at the Congress of Nations building in their guises of Sen. Deborah Bright and her husband, Marc. But before the senator can receive her award for saving children in conflict zones, a waiter accidentally hits her face with a tray. Her disguise rips, and she flees to a secluded room. As she spreads her wings to escape from a window, a drunken guest spots her. The man, Jack March, is a recently laid-off reporter for the Capital Herald. Deborah and Marc do what any Mythical must in this situation—neutralize the witness. They call in Sam, an irresistible pixie, to seduce and discredit Jack. Meanwhile, Sen. Warren F. Lee, secretly a werewolf, pressures Deborah to support increased military spending. Yet she knows that this won’t help the Mythicals’ ultimate goal: “to guide the planet toward a lasting, planetary peace.” But military aid may be a moot point if the Wardens declare the Mythicals’ hosts to be a “terminal species,” too destructive to continue. In this wickedly clever adventure, Meredith (The Neuromorphs, 2018, etc.) adds political and environmental savvy for good measure. While the Mythicals—including Mike the ogre and Steve the troll—are exiles from various home worlds, each race (except the werewolves) has triumphed over its worst tendencies. As Lee tells the humans, “Many of your signal technological achievements...enhance your ability to kill.” Fans should delight in the author’s genre subversion, like his elves, which are really the bulb-headed aliens of modern folklore. There’s also a randy sense of humor in the Mythicals’ commitment to nudity. Plot points like the Genetic Fitness Law, which would place women in charge worldwide, will stir healthy debate. Best of all is the twist involving a hidden race of Pilgrims, which slams home an environmental lesson in a manner that few novels attempt.
A meticulously orchestrated genre mashup with an urgent, heartfelt message.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-939118-29-5
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Glyphus, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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