In a sequel of sorts to The Sovereign Order of Monte Cristo (2013), hacker extraordinaire Zaydee exacts revenge from within a federal prison after she’s falsely arrested by two corrupt FBI agents.
This bundle—composed of the previously published That Girl Started Her Own Country (2012) and its sequel, The Anonymous Girl (2013)—has the pseudonymous Holy Ghost Writer putting a twist on the vengeance of the wrongfully accused that drives Dumas’ original The Count of Monte Cristo, crossing it with elements of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy and the real-life adventures of hacker groups like Anonymous. In a shady set of circumstances that involves stock-market manipulation, FBI agents Whitehead and Binder coerce a crooked lawyer to help them entrap his client Zaydee, a descendant of the Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond Dantes, and thus heir to the tangled nexus of secret societies established in the previous book. After the agents mockingly book her under the pseudonym “Princess Jane Doe,” Zaydee decides to retain her anonymity throughout her trial and, using her nearly supernatural hacking talent to maintain contact with the world outside the federal detention center, to falsely incriminate the agents who entrapped her. She’s assisted by a colorful range of fellow inmates, including a former Soviet spy, an insurance fraudster and some practitioners of Haitian magic, as well as a besotted security guard whose uncanny resemblance to Zaydee comes in handy for the occasional sortie beyond the prison gates. Meanwhile, Zaydee’s former lover Steve Larson is on the run for an exposé he wrote on the Bilderberg Group, and Remey Sommers, a young man who’s deeply involved in the secret Skull and Bones society and heavily invested in genetic engineering, pines for the enigmatic girl who seduced him over spring break and then turned up on the front page of the Miami Herald as Princess Jane Doe. Believability and logic are in short supply, and to say that most of the plot elements are ripped from the headlines is an understatement—the narrative can feel like an entire day’s worth of CNN crawlers. The cat-and-mouse element of Zaydee’s revenge on the FBI agents goes on much too long, and though Zaydee carries off an audacious intellectual property theft that, in the real world, should indeed land her behind bars, it doesn’t occur until she’s been incarcerated for months. The sketchiness of her original arrest is an ongoing irritation that isn’t even addressed in the interminable court scenes.
A persecution fantasy for conspiracy theorists.
Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495936968
Page Count: 410
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
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.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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