An uneven but entertaining tale about the struggle to displace dirty energy sources.
In this environmental thriller, an American attempts to protect his family from shadowy forces in Peru.
American engineer and renewable energy specialist Frank Anderson is excited to work on a solar project high in the Andes, even if he has some suspicions regarding the motivations of the oil company that is funding it. If he is successful, it may serve as a blueprint for future solar installations in the region. Not long into the work, Frank is pulled from his car and violently beaten by a gang of masked men bearing machetes and hammers. His wife, Joanna Tavares, leaves their children home in California to stand by Frank’s hospital bedside. But shortly after her arrival, she receives a sloppy, threatening note mentioning their daughters, one almost identical to the message her husband received before his attack: “MRS ANDERSON WELCOME TO HOTEL RESIDENCIAL YOU HAVE BEUATIFUL GIRLS.” Joanna is soon kidnapped outside of the hotel by another gang of men, leaving Frank in a precarious state. Who is targeting his family and why? As he works to rescue his wife—and she plots to escape—Frank must determine the parties involved not only in his beating and her kidnapping, but also the solar project that employs him. It’s a conspiracy that will lead him to powerful corporate entities in both Peru and the United States—for whom the lure of profit is easily worth the cost of human life. Smolders’ (Cloning Galinda, 2017, etc.) prose is controlled and fluid: “When Google arrived, it spoke” a cruel “language: horrifying accidents in the Andes mountains; hypoxia, altitude sickness of the worst kind; indecipherable languages; drugs; cocaine candy; terrorists; Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path resurging; kidnapping; poisoning.” The novel moves rather slowly at the beginning, and its villains are pretty easy to identify. Even so, the time that Smolders takes to build his world is well spent, increasing the verisimilitude of what could have been a silly plot in lesser hands. The dramatic setting and some compelling characters—particularly Joanna and her environmentalist sister, Anita—help to make this a believable and enjoyable read.
An uneven but entertaining tale about the struggle to displace dirty energy sources.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6666-5
Page Count: 254
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2019
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 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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