An entertaining and thoughtful robot tale with a dramatic climax.
An android built to take the place of a seventh grader winds up hijacking his life in this middle-grade SF novel.
Seventh grade at Borelon Middle School has been no fun at all for Chuck Bowinger, almost 13 years old. Last year, he was short and cute; this year, he’s gangly and pimpled. Classes are more challenging; he can’t talk to girls; and Bailey Higgins trips him in the hallways. Wouldn’t it be great, Chuck muses, if he “could just lie in bed all day and game”? When his best friends, engineers Rainie Warren and Maxwell Lee, ask him to join their science fair project, at first C-student Chuck is reluctant. But he has a brilliant idea and convinces his friends to build a robot version of himself, who’ll take his place at school and win first prize on SciDay. Rainie and Max solve the technical problems, and the result is C.H.U.C.K.: Computerized Human Under Control of Kid. After constructing a secret hideaway in the basement, Chuck sends C.H.U.C.K. to school, controlling him like an avatar in a video game. Suddenly, he’s doing great in school and gym class while impressing his crush, Samantha Benedeer. But before long, C.H.U.C.K. develops a mind of his own. He wants Chuck’s life for himself—and that’s only the beginning. It’s boy versus android, leading to a striking SciDay showdown. Harelik (Monster Boy, 2017) has an engaging premise, with great appeal for any reader who ever wanted to retreat from the difficult world of middle school while still making a good showing in public. Of course, it’s not exactly believable that two seventh graders could construct such a perfect simulacrum, but the author provides somewhat plausible explanations (“I’m lucky my father owns a small but successful robotics laboratory right here in Borelon,” comments Max). Comic as the book often is, there are some serious undercurrents here about facing up to problems and actually living your life, pimples and all. Chuck also discovers a new appreciation for the warmth and exchanges of family life; even Bailey comes in for reassessment.
An entertaining and thoughtful robot tale with a dramatic climax.Pub Date: April 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73392-732-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Prawn Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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