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 best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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