A clunky outer-space adventure that tries to amuse but has trouble hiding its rage.
Evans critiques the political left in this satirical sci-fi debut.
On a distant planet where various humanoid species live together in peace, human college student Luke Porter is a progressive member of United Students for Social Justice who feels guilty when he has intolerant thoughts, as when he’s briefly frightened by his alien best friend Sur’Sin (whom Evans describes as “coal-dark”). Luke is beginning to think that he’s in love with his human girlfriend, Emily den Charlatan, but then she ghosts him; he finally learns that she’s not interested in him from a mouthy human malcontent named Jeb. Luke then tracks down her roommate and realizes that Emily is actually missing. He sets out to find her, beginning with the last person who saw her—Jeb, who seems to have a crush on him. So begins Luke’s journey around the planet, during which he encounters ideas from across the political spectrum. Along the way, he begins to realize that the members of the ruling Gaian Sisterhood, who claim to hate intolerance in all its forms, may be rather intolerant themselves. Evans offers some imaginative worldbuilding in this sci-fi tale. Unfortunately, it’s ultimately too didactic to function as effective fiction, as seemingly every scene and conversation feels like a digression into some aspect of the current, real-life American culture war. He even occasionally includes brief polemics at the beginnings of chapters—at one point espousing, for example, the necessity of stereotypes. Evans makes little attempt to immerse readers in the reality of his story. Instead, the book unleashes its grievances in a heavy-handed fashion, attempting to discredit multiculturalism and immigration via awkward allegories.
A clunky outer-space adventure that tries to amuse but has trouble hiding its rage.Pub Date: July 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-08-082417-5
Page Count: 305
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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