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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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