A well-plotted story that gives a voice to an offbeat protagonist.
In this novel by former TV writer Moss (The Rosenberg Espionage Case, 1999, etc.), a teenager with Asperger’s syndrome exposes a devastating corporate-technology secret.
Alex attends Mason Middle School, where he finds it a struggle not to cause occasional disruptions. Then, one day, an experimental, educational computer program, developed by the creators of Calliope—the “world’s most powerful super-computer”—causes him and other kids with special needs to have fits. After a monitor explodes during a test run, Alex sees what he thinks are “fruit flies” whenever he passes a Calliope screen. Concerned for his health, his mother takes him to Calliope headquarters for additional testing. But while they’re there, she appears to be hypnotized by Calliope tech, leaving Alex in the hands of the company’s scientists. Luckily, his classmate Sara Cohen is concerned about his school absences and tracks him down. Later, when the teens join a group of renegade bookstore owners and fight against supercomputer “Sophie,” they stumble upon a greater issue. Kids who cause trouble go to Calliope “Wellness Camp”; and soon Alex and Sara are shuffled into the re-education program. Moss, who wrote for such TV shows as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and She-Ra: Princess of Power, employs a first-person voice that’s very close to that of the narrator of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The author’s attentiveness to technical details brings to mind Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), although the dystopia in this novel is more fascist in tone. The story’s overall pace is fast and focused. However, it might have been better if Moss slowed things down during certain important scenes, as when Alex and Sara witness a murder. The surplus of side characters can be confusing, particularly during the final battle. Still, readers will likely be too engaged with the plot to be overly concerned.
A well-plotted story that gives a voice to an offbeat protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73279-102-2
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Pedernales Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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