Despite an interesting premise and rich detail, the novel struggles to create compelling characters whose personal goals...
A rendition of Frankenstein set in 2165, Roque’s debut boils over with rogue scientists and megalomaniacs scheming world domination.
New spy on the block Jia Chen is a Chinese physicist turned psychiatrist when she receives her big break. As the new liaison to Wang Robotics, Jia reports for her first day in the lab only to discover brilliant doctor Lanning Balcourt dying on the floor having been mauled by a lab animal. A surgical team executes Balcourt’s final wish to transplant his central nervous system into a host body. But when Balcourt awakens, Jia realizes this medical advance may not be for the benefit of mankind. Meanwhile, billionaire Augustus Wang garners fame and influence for his robotic designs, and his ambitions may forever alter the future of his beloved China. The novel’s setting is an example of the author’s fertile imagination; public transport is envisioned as tubes which scuttle commuters from one end of the country to the other. Yet the story struggles with pacing and character development. In a politically complex and multiethnic world, the author fills in background details in lengthy chunks that break up the novel’s flow; long explanations of Latin sayings and Chinese proverbs hinder the narrative flow. At times, dialogue meanders for over 20 lines, diluting readers’ sense of wonder. Academic exposition results in flat characters who simply move along in the landscape. As the protagonist, Jia should be a dynamic force within the prose, making decisions that impact the story and her own psyche; instead, she remains passive, relaying the action around her without the pathos required for an audience to invest in her battle. Ultimately, she is an enigma, often behaving in a manner hardly reflective of a government agent.
Despite an interesting premise and rich detail, the novel struggles to create compelling characters whose personal goals clearly motivate their actions.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0985163815
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Ilow Martin Roque
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
