Abbas’ (HWJN, 2013) latest novel mixes sci-fi, fantasy and pure adolescent adventure.
When Husam wakes up, he can’t even remember his own name. Even stranger, he’s in a place he’s never seen before—a huge, open room under one of several crystal-clear domes. And when he looks at himself, he realizes he’s about 20 centimeters taller, with the body of a fitness junkie instead of his usual couch potato physique and forgettable looks. Then the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen walks into the room and offers to show him around this strange place. Eventually introducing herself as Malak, she says she can only answer yes or no to his questions; if she were to simply explain where he is and what has happened to him, he could never go back to his own life. Husam insists that he has to return home to take care of his mother and sister, but the amazing world in which he finds himself—and the stunning Malak—is hard to resist. Then, after he has left the room, a stranger tries to kill him by crashing into Husam’s Jet Ski, and later, the mysterious Mr. Khaled tries to poison him. As his near-death experiences become more and more intense, Husam realizes that if he doesn’t figure things out quickly, he may never get the chance. Despite Husam’s overnight transformation—from a short, overweight wimp into a tall, fit action hero who can eat all he wants and have all the expensive toys he longed for—he doesn’t grow or change in a meaningful way. He was rather shallow and rudderless in the old world, and in the new world, though his supercharged brain makes it easy for him to do anything—outplaying Beethoven or out-fighting Bruce Lee, for example—he doesn’t develop the levels of discipline and responsibility needed to manage those skills wisely. Abbas seems to be trying to send a profound message through Husam’s story, but whatever that message is, it’s lost in a blur of heroics and fantasy—not to mention typos and muddled syntax: “I could not tell how much time I spent absorbed into my master piece, it was as if I was in a coma that I awakened from after I was done.”
A blur of self-indulgence and high-tech battles obscures a deeper message.
Pub Date: June 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-9948205838
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Yatakhayaloon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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