A shimmering sci-fi ode to the ’60s and true love.
In this time-travel caper, a thief obsessed with making a fortune experiences sublime moments in history and hard truths.
Twenty-eight-year-old T.J. is haunted by dreams of lovely days spent with his soul mate. Yet at the end of each one, the woman reveals that she’s developed feelings for someone else. Various shrinks have tried to explain that the woman represents T.J.’s mother, who died when he “was very young,” and even his father, whom he never knew. T.J., a thief since the age of 8, isn't convinced. He grew up in the Los Angeles foster care system, with his best parents being Jack and Jen Carpelli, who also adopted a girl named Myra. After this idyllic family life unravels, T.J. ends up enjoying a successful solo career in thievery. Then he takes the advice of his fence, Wendy Washington, joins a crew to steal a Jackson Pollock painting, and ends up in prison. There, he discovers a love of physics. On parole, he becomes a janitor at the California Institute of Technology and befriends the aging professor Aldous Szabo. Szabo introduces T.J. to his time-traveling smartwatch, entrusting the thief to get his invention—and the related research—to NASA. The twists that follow see Abugov (Zombies Versus Aliens Versus Vampires Versus Dinosaurs, 2015, etc.) performing a literary M.C. Escher impression, in which motifs (like Bob Dylan’s music) and characters (the adult Myra) interlock in satisfying and often unexpected ways. But the author’s sense of humor results in nightmarish time-traveling conditions for his protagonist, including the rule that T.J. is naked after jumping across decades. And for the thief to steal anything—money, for example—it must travel in T.J.’s rectum. The tangled details of an “infinite time loop,” in which characters interact with time-displaced twins, are fun to follow. But the book’s beating heart is Ruth Anne Lee, whom T.J. meets in 1961. He encourages her to speak her mind, and through her, he ultimately learns how best to wrangle the watch’s power. Fans of time-travel tales will kick themselves if they miss this one.
A shimmering sci-fi ode to the ’60s and true love.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9985784-1-5
Page Count: 316
Publisher: J-Stroke Productions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
