A sometimes-engaging novel with unsubtle but timely morals.
A safety officer’s daughter and a newly naturalized citizen decide where their allegiances lie in Doty’s YA dystopian debut.
As a requirement for induction into the Safety Officer Academy, Jenny Morgan must act as a buddy to an “opportunity person”—a teenager who’s recently moved out of the immigrant ghettos known as Homesteads to become an American citizen. Although Jenny wants to become a safety officer like her mother—and work with the “viewers,” who monitor people at all times—Jenny would rather spend time flirting with her crush, the rebellious Kyle Foster, than watching over her “buddy,” Hannah Cossack. Hannah, the daughter of a Ukrainian immigrant, is having trouble adjusting to citizen life; Jenny’s friends bully her, and she’s uncomfortable with the law stating that all citizens over the age of 14 must carry a gun called a "Protector." Kyle introduces Hannah to bad-boy Jonah and their anti-Governcorp group, but Hannah worries that joining it herself would endanger her family. Although most citizens mindlessly follow instructions from the Broadcasters (a type of public-address system), Kyle announces his intention to protest at the upcoming government-run parade, and for the first time, Jenny and Hannah are forced to make decisions for themselves. Should Jenny report Kyle to her mother? And should Hannah endanger her family’s fragile new citizenship to fight alongside him? The messages in this novel lack subtlety, and similarities to dystopian classics, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, prevent the worldbuilding from feeling truly fresh. A debate about peaceful and violent protest is brought up only briefly and could have used more nuance, and any discussion of racism’s role in anti-immigrant sentiment is conspicuously absent. Even so, the novel’s exploration of pro-gun trends feels chillingly real. Alternating first-person narration allows readers to empathize with both Jenny’s and Hannah’s multifaceted moral dilemmas. Although much of the novel is focused on everyday school life—with its unquestioned emphasis on shopping and crushes—the suspense eventually builds to a frantic pace during the parade, and the open-ended conclusion will force readers, too, to think for themselves.
A sometimes-engaging novel with unsubtle but timely morals.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-89761-4
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Four Wise Monkeys Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 8, 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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