A bizarre yet entertaining coming-of-age story.
In Jamin’s thriller, a lost boy foresakes his past and embarks upon death-defying adventures around the world.
Jamin’s debut opens with a scenario familiar to the thriller genre: The young daughter of a wealthy businessman is kidnapped by a small, ruthless group led by a lean fighter wearing sunglasses and a ponytail. The kidnappers demand a ransom from the girl’s father but neglect to mention they’ve also accidentally abducted Carla’s friend Michael Dinero, a wiry, brilliant teen who manages to escape his captors before they deliver Carla to her parents. The girl is safe but traumatized, but there’s a problem: Michael left his backpack behind and his kidnappers know exactly where to find him and his parents, biotech millionaire Bob and tough, strident Gail. The Dineros hire ex–Secret Service agent Kevin “Boss” Daley to assemble an extremely well-paid team of experts to lower the profile of their opulent home and provide round-the-clock security. Boss and his team deal with threats both real and imagined, and the book seems poised to move toward a standard showdown with the villain. However, a quarter of the way in, everything shifts slightly toward the surreal; young Michael, in fear for his life and no longer willing to put his parents in danger, eludes his security team and disappears into the wilderness. Armed only with survival skills and calling himself Yorick, he spends months roughing it until the day he strikes up a conversation with eccentric millionaire Mr. Earle, who heads a shady international mercenary outfit called BlackBox Corporation. Earle’s bodyguard, Darwin, is an enigmatic figure who will become Queequeg to Yorick’s Ishmael. Impressed by Yorick’s computer skills, BlackBox hires him, sending him off on a series of far-flung international adventures that comprise the rest of the book. The text could use a thorough scrub to catch the kind of errors a computer’s spell-check would miss (“lightening” for “lightning” being one example). Despite those flaws, the important things—character development, dialogue, plotting and exuberant narrative flow—are all here in abundance.
A bizarre yet entertaining coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-615-59829-1
Page Count: 426
Publisher: G.A. Jamin
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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