by Howard Manson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2012
A spy story that feels wordy but redeems itself with strong characterization and an impressive ear for dialogue.
A mousy scientist's knowledge of nuclear secrets puts her in the middle of a 72-hour game of kill-or-be-killed in Manson's debut thriller.
Katherine Richmond just wanted a trip to China to ease her job and marriage tensions; she ends up with post-traumatic stress disorder, an international scandal and an unfulfilled romance with a twisted double agent. An often overworked plotline sees Katherine kidnapped, tortured and subsequently rescued by super secretive Michael Sunday. Katherine is frequently confused, and readers will likely feel the same as they struggle to understand where Sunday is dragging Katherine, who they are talking to and whether anyone is telling the truth. Author Manson creates so many plot twists and turns, readers will have a hard time keeping up with which characters are good and which are downright rotten. Yet the conversations between Sunday and Katherine keep the narrative moving regardless of the evil political machinations going on around them. Two broken people, both suffering from lost love, find something human inside one another despite being surrounded by blood, gore and a Big Brother-like Chinese government. Their back-and-forth banter feels natural and fluid, making these two more interesting and relatable by the page. Manson’s clear technical knowledge of the work Sunday does, whether interrogation or inflicting pain, is impressive. But his portrayal of Katherine and the spy who loved her as complete people despite their flaws buoys the book's murky plot. The couple’s strange desire for success, unwillingness to compromise and sudden passion for one another all lend depth and nuance to this uneven look at today's political landscape.
A spy story that feels wordy but redeems itself with strong characterization and an impressive ear for dialogue.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615585727
Page Count: 298
Publisher: EM.c Press
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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