An ambitious, thoughtful debut that needs additional focus.
Cruz’s action/fantasy debut sees a young woman take on an entrenched, corrupt league of mixed martial arts fighters.
In 2032, Kirin Rise is a 19-year-old photographer living in Chicago. She’s also a student of the rogue martial art gung fu, which isn’t sanctioned by the United Federation of Mixed Fighting. With the country’s middle class nearly abolished, the federation’s brutal entertainment empire helps people vent their frustrations and win some quick cash. One Saturday night, the undersized Kirin decides to fight in a match open to so-called amateurs—and defeats her opponent with one punch! From then on, she’s a celebrity who must navigate the chaotic world of fans and media exposure. Her former teacher Sifu contacts her, wondering why she has upset her tranquil life. Kirin explains that she’s taking a stand against the complacency that poisons the nation. Everything changes, however, when the federation approaches her to officially join. Does she dare enter the system she loathes, even if it gets her access to its president, Jacob Thorne? She’d also have to survive the UFMF’s deadly endgame, full of the most savage fighters, known as the DOME. The novel’s tone seems to be against mixed fighting; as Kirin opines, “Americans lack the patience and attention span to develop true skill...what they’ve done is fast food the hell out of martial arts.” The best moments in the narrative focus on key elements that genuine martial artists can appreciate; they “stand and walk differently,” for example, because they work on their centers of gravity. But too many flashbacks and character-building vignettes distract as the tale progresses. The novel also casually broaches hot-button topics like gun ownership and reality television without fully exploring them. These elements become light décor on a future world that feels a lot like 2014 (aside from a few imaginative gadgets). Langtiw’s Japanese manga–inspired illustrations are well-done but few in number.
An ambitious, thoughtful debut that needs additional focus.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496929662
Page Count: 482
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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