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DEAR CYBORGS

Name: DEAR CYBORGS
Author: Eugene Lim
ISBN: 978-0-374-53711-1

by Eugene Lim ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2017

A colorful meditation on friendship and creation nested within a fictional universe.

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A childhood friendship marks a young Korean-American man’s imagination for life.

Lim (The Strangers, 2013, etc.) goes full meta for a twisty, often confusing, but entertaining reflection on art, resistance, heroes, and villains. It begins simply enough, with our nameless narrator describing what it’s like to be a preteen of Asian descent living in rural Ohio. The protagonist’s most important relationship is with his friend Vu, a cipher who disappears and reappears throughout the novel. In this opening chapter, Lim tosses in a throwaway line that turns out to resonate later: “Here is one lesson that Vu taught me. It maybe doesn’t seem on the surface to be about comic books, but it is.” But from here, things get pretty weird. Strange and somewhat vague interstitial messages, all starting with the titular greeting "Dear Cyborgs," serve as the pivot between different narratives—“When I say cyborgs, of course I mean us,” the book explains later. Following the introduction, Lim abruptly cuts to the narrative of cyberpunk detective Frank Exit, who is hot on the heels of a cultural terrorist named Ms. Mistleto. The hyperkinetic chapters focused on their conflict find the duo chasing each other in far-flung locales from Sri Lanka to the Himalayas. Yet other chapters find the primary narrator, a writer, deep in discussions with his sister and other friends on topics largely centered on the nature of art and protest and ranging from a Bangladeshi artist who commits suicide to the activist and Black Panther Richard Aoki. The villain Ms. Mistleto also becomes a flesh-and-blood character complete with an origin story. “Losing everything does gift you with freedom if nothing else,” she explains. “That’s a rewrite of a pithier song refrain.” It’s not always easy to follow; at one point, Lim randomly inserts a chapter from the detective novel that one of the book’s fictional characters is reading. But it is eerily reflective of our fractured times, darting from subject to subject with the speed of a mouse click.

A colorful meditation on friendship and creation nested within a fictional universe.

Pub Date: June 6, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-374-53711-1

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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by Kristin Hannah

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THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.