A pointed, if occasionally hyperbolic, take on dystopian sci-fi.
Bankole draws on contemporary racial issues to craft an unsettling future in her debut sci-fi novel.
In a dystopian future, the Earth’s surface has been rendered uninhabitable, and the United States has been dissolved following a second civil war. The residents of the Republic of Kalifornia are divided between those who make their homes on the floating Sky Shelf and those who live in surface slums and underground tunnels. The Sky Shelf residents live in a high-tech metropolis with modern food and medicine, while those below suffer from genetic mutations and poverty. The poor often resort to trading blood samples for basic amenities, as doctors use their blood to produce medicine. Those in the tunnels lead communal lives shaped by mysticism and spirituality, engaging in meditative rituals and practicing alternative forms of healing. The society is further divided by strict racial segregation; the Sky Shelf government has even placed a ban on interracial relationships to keep bloodlines pure, banishing those without proper pedigrees. Messob is a young woman living in the tunnels who’s fated to travel to the Sky Shelf as an ambassador for her people and to work to end the racist laws. Her quest is complicated, however, by her taboo romance with a young doctor who believes that her blood could be the key to developing more effective medicine. Bankole effectively uses multiple historical and cultural allusions to shape her vision of a troubled future, and she roots her world’s woes in present-day politics, which gives the novel a rich, evocative subtext. However, it also limits the effectiveness of the parallels she draws. References to real-life events (such as the killing of Trayvon Martin) resonantly clarify the story’s core concept but may also come off as heavy-handed. These moments are spare, however, and the overall subject matter is strong enough to make up for a few missteps.
A pointed, if occasionally hyperbolic, take on dystopian sci-fi.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1595945235
Page Count: 252
Publisher: WingSpan Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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