Deep-sea thrills enliven this sequel to Stevenson’s well-received debut, Torchlight (1997). Stevenson III, a relative both of his namesake and also of Hart Crane, has done much treasure-diving off New England, including over 20 dives to the Andrea Doria. Thus, he knows whereof he speaks when his underwater heros, ex-Navy SEALs Philip Drake and Jack Henderson, are first seen while entering that doomed oceanliner. This prepares us for the bigger job ahead: the recovery of a defense satellite fallen into the Atlantic, off the shore of Maine. The satellite, called Bright Star and created for the defense industry by William Lawrence, the black genius who heads Systems Technologies, is capable of launching a thousand laser beams at once, wiping out enemy forces in one megablow while also creating a defensive nuclear shield. But before Bright Star is launched into orbit, the nuclear stealth submarine Trident is hijacked by terrorists. While the shuttle Atlantis bears Bright Star 200 miles aloft, a massive computer failure shuts down the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers and Atlantis sinks into the ocean 50 miles off Bristol, Maine—not far from the missing Trident. Drake and Henderson manage to dive about the floating shuttle and rescue two crewmen before Atlantis sinks toward the ocean floor, while Jack Henderson dies, impaled by a speargun—and Bright Star becomes bait for the Trident terrorists. Will the terrorists sell Bright Star to—well, China?—with Bright Star going operational for the unfriendly nation within weeks? What is Drake’s best ploy for saving his country from the misuse of Bright Star? The answers, my friend, are blowing in sea currents that have the force of express trains. With every item of hardware identified by its spec number, this Clancy clone has its own energy and tension while, in the murkiest depths, fresh chills arise page by page. Not new, but well done indeed.
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14444-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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