A lesson in smart, assured storytelling.
In this supernatural debut, a professor and his team of ghost hunters help restless spirits in an abandoned mental hospital.
Professor Roy Donnelly runs the astrophysics department at Duncan University. Lonely since his wife, Margaret, died two years ago, he finds solace working alongside Brad, his brilliant assistant. Brad, inventor of a special camera called the Blue Viewer, brings the professor with him to an old mine shaft to test the device deep in darkness. Through the viewer, they witness and record the astonishing presence of ghosts—spectral remnants of miners who died in an accident in the 1890s. Brad’s excitement leads him to enlist a young group of supernatural enthusiasts called the Specter Inspectors—Kevin, June and Daniel—to help explore the phenomenon further. They lead Brad and the professor to the Murrydale Regional State Hospital, where a mass murder occurred in the 1950s. There, the group encounters not only a population of ghosts suffering in turmoil, but also their tormentor—a spindly, pitch-black creature that drains spectral energy. After the terrifying incident, the professor and his team have nightmares in which the black creature demands that “Jacob” be handed over. Can the rigorous application of science help bring this mystery figure to light and ease the spirits’ pain? Author E.L.I. writes a love letter to science and the supernatural in this tightly constructed debut. The details of how these spirits exist are as complex as they are lovely; one, for example, appears to be “made of some type of light-blue plastic pressed so thin it is nearly transparent and the hollow center is filled with a milky white fog consisting of little twinkling white lights.” Elsewhere are superficial similarities to the Ghostbusters films, such as the “Recharger” gun and special “Blue View” glasses. But this isn’t really an action story; the narrative is a sweet one, more concerned with reconciling spirituality with the idea that a scientist shouldn’t ever claim to know everything. As the professor says, “[T]he more I learn about the universe, the greater the reality that I know so little about the universe”—a great reminder for children and adults alike.
A lesson in smart, assured storytelling.Pub Date: March 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495473340
Page Count: 168
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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