An engrossing page-turner, and though some might find its characters a bit too familiar, Luna’s penchant for plot twists...
In Luna’s science fiction action thriller, a heroic astronaut must rescue his crew and his save his mission from a sinister conspiracy.
The near-future world of the novel sees man walking on Mars, but the planet’s role to play with humanity depends on Cmdr. Matthew “Mac” MacTavish and the crew of the spaceship Mars 2. Mac’s team of scientists and engineers must build a sustainable habitat on Mars, prepare it for the imminent arrival of Mars 3, along with a new group of astronauts, and then, hopefully, a perpetual influx of pioneers. But during their final days on the red planet, Mac’s team suddenly loses contact with Earth and Mars 3. Dr. Boyle, the crew’s pompous scientific lead, believes the spaceship, as well as everyone on Earth, has been killed by a massive solar flare. While Mac decides how to handle this catastrophe, Mars 3 unexpectedly lands near the team’s base. Mac struggles to solve this riddle, but his investigation only yields more questions, with every sliver of truth placing Mac and his crew deeper in danger. The book continues on a hydra-headed path for the duration of the story, making it compulsively engaging. As Dr. Boyle constantly reiterates, the truth is bigger than Mac can imagine. To service his plot, Luna’s characters are drawn from tried-and-true molds and travel through the book on predictable arcs. Dr. Boyle, unsurprisingly, emerges as the story’s key antagonist and grandstands like a true Bond villain. He is the perfect foil to the heroically square-jawed and straight-laced Mac, who leads his team with paternal care. Luna makes a point of highlighting Mac’s relationship with the rest of his team, immersing the reader in their camaraderie. This turns out to be an important aspect, as it gives the story a real sense of danger. Though these characters, on their own, are not necessarily special, the relationships among them are—and it hurts when Luna severs them.
An engrossing page-turner, and though some might find its characters a bit too familiar, Luna’s penchant for plot twists provide an ultimately satisfying read.Pub Date: May 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615464657
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Gravity Bay
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2011
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 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
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