Next book

AHE'EY

A bracing mix of emotionally and intellectually honest fantasy.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

In this romantic tale, a champion of women’s empowerment stumbles on a hidden—and seemingly perfect—society.

Morgan Lua, head and founder of the Hope Foundation, has just arrived in New York City. Advocating for girls’ educational success, she’ll be a star attraction at the Girl’s Speak Out conference. The mayor introduces her to Gabriel Warren, head of the philanthropic group Ange’el and her host in New York. While Morgan is entranced by his gorgeous blue-green eyes, she also finds, in his suite at the Pierre Hotel, “no sign of vanity. Everything about him was practical and simple and yet of great quality and taste.” He invites her to a gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the evening is interrupted by knife-wielding assailants. Gabriel subdues them, later revealing that he’s with the CIA, assigned to protect her from those aligned with the Men’s Rights Defense group and their speaker and presidential candidate, Walter Zanus. Further attacks lead Gabriel to take his protection of Morgan to the utmost—he brings her home to Ahe’ey, the secret realm from which he and his genetically enhanced brethren hail. In Ahe’ey, Morgan discovers stunning, nature-infused architecture and a functioning matriarchy. Yet the more she learns about Gabriel’s world, the less ideal it becomes. In her invigorating fantasy series opener, Le Fay (Ange’el, 2014) flaunts her progressive heart proudly, as when Morgan says citizens need to get “the best out of every young person regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation or aptitude.” Zanus, meanwhile, stands in for the actual 45th president of the U.S. in saying of his “pure daughters” that if “they weren’t” mine, “I’d be dating them.” Le Fay also creates a robust mythology surrounding the four tribes of Ahe’ey: the Ange’el, the Ma’asai, the Yi’ingo, and the Hu’urei. Thirty years ago, civil war resulted in the sequestering of these bloodlines, and men are forbidden to rule. Gabriel realizes, however, that their “demise...started the day we designed an unequal society.” His and Morgan’s love proves transformative, and readers should delight in witnessing its repercussions.

A bracing mix of emotionally and intellectually honest fantasy.

Pub Date: April 26, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-646-96918-3

Page Count: 696

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: April 10, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017

Categories:
Next book

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

Categories:
Next book

JURASSIC PARK

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

Categories:
Close Quickview