A briskly plotted, exhilarating adventure that will test even the most carefree reader's suspension of disbelief.
Amidst an intergalactic war, alpine warrior Lt. Cynthia Scott battles aliens on the frigid planet of Ostark.
An unexpected alien invasion commences just as Scott, a stunner with West Point and Cambridge degrees, completes special ops training. The X-Chri, whose bloodlust drives them to butcher their human enemies, have overrun several of Ostark's cities, killing Cynthia's fiancé in the process. The humans retreat to a safe zone protected by powerful surface-to-air weapons that keep the alien ships at bay, and the battle for Ostark devolves into a scattered ground war of ambushes and ski chases. Cynthia is paired with Maj. Jim Harkins, 21 years her senior, and the two quickly distinguish themselves on the battlefield. One mission follows another, and in the course of hunting and fleeing the aliens, Cynthia and Jim become intimate. Harrigan's rendering of this futuristic world is a mixed bag. The author takes pains to describe the workings of nanosuits and plasma projectors, but never adequately explains why exactly the X-Chri are fighting the humans. The X-Chri are portrayed as tribal and totalitarian; battlefield honor is their race's sole virtue. In short, the struggle could not be more Manichaean. Still, the action keeps these quibbles at bay while the two soldiers remain on Ostark. But once they pursue the alien clan leader to another planet, Cynthia's increasing powers stretch reality, even the invented reality of the 23rd century. Eventually, she becomes the first human to win a computer's love, and together, they crack the futuristic equivalent of Fermat's Last Theorem–also, she forges a telepathic bond with the X-Chri leader, another first for humankind.
A briskly plotted, exhilarating adventure that will test even the most carefree reader's suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-4184-0380-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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