Starts effectively as a gripping survival story, but the explorer fantasy and deus ex machina approach hamper the tale.
A young survivor of a pirate attack discovers a mysterious island in this YA fantasy adventure.
New Zealander Sam Warburton, age 12, is enjoying a luxury yacht vacation in Indonesia with his parents, his best friend, and his father’s business partner, Frank Trent, when pirates attack. They kill almost everyone aboard and sink the yacht—but not before rescuing Trent and his black briefcase. What’s that about? Sam doesn’t have time to think; hiding aboard an inflatable life raft, he manages to escape. Over several stressful days, Sam attempts to stay alive, gaining assistance from animal helpers. He finds an island and starts building a hut, but the fierce local fauna set him wandering. So far, Wilson’s (The Young King, 2017, etc.) book has much in common with other vibrant tales of resilient, clever young people surviving on their own, like Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain or Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins, and provides similar pleasures. When Sam encounters islanders, though, the novel takes an unfortunate turn to another kind of story: white explorer meets ignorant nonwhite natives and astounds them with his superior knowledge. They are all amazed at Sam’s snorkel, first aid, rugby tackles, freestyle swimming strokes, and outriggers for their canoes, considering the boy a “wonder man,” making some young men jealous and leading to painful images like “grins and shiny white teeth were the order of the day.” Sam, meanwhile, has nothing to learn from people who are experts in their environment. With this awkward bwana fantasy now in full swing, the book turns again. Suddenly, anything goes: green-robed, English-speaking priests from a large, elaborate compound “based on the great gardens of Babylon and Egypt” appear and demand some villagers for sacrifice, including Lastri, a girl Sam likes. But if Sam wins a ritual race and retrieves a treasure, he can save the intended victims. Thanks—and only thanks—to frequent magical assists from the treasure, Sam prevails. Will he now try to return to civilization and search for Trent?
Starts effectively as a gripping survival story, but the explorer fantasy and deus ex machina approach hamper the tale.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5144-6618-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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