A vague supernatural tale hidden in ruminations on psychic photons.
After her murder, a woman reaches out from another dimension to find a good home for her pets in this debut novel.
An intuitive pharmacist discovers discrepancies at her place of work: the ordering of too many narcotics and the moving of money deceptively. Her corporate bosses are being strong-armed by a cartel, which does not care for her meddling and stages a fatal car crash to get rid of her. Untethered from her corporeal body, the pharmacist is transported to an ethereal dimension of glowing orbs and vibrations, able to read the minds and influence the actions of the living. Her immediate concern is to transfer her orphaned special needs dogs—Penny, Wilbur, Chance, and Jake—and her sometimes-intractable parrot to the home of an elderly woman, an ex–political activist, who needs the companionship as much as the animals. To effect this change, the pharmacist brings closer together a green-haired veterinarian tech and a shelter van driver, who aid the pets. The pair also helps a middle-aged racist confront the abuse that feeds his bigotry. But when the old woman dies, the pharmacist finds she is not done with the living world, as she takes over the body of her pets’ new caretaker at the cost of her powers. Ellerup’s novel is as intangible as the other dimension its protagonist finds herself in. Characters aren’t given names save for the dogs; by the book’s own admission, this is to provide an “immersive experience of using your imagination and personal experience.” This puts the impetus on readers to fill in the blanks, with characters reduced to physical traits or their jobs and settings left vague. Some personality can be gleaned from the tale’s dialogue, which, despite grappling with metaphysical ideas, is natural and affable. The nature of the other dimension and the powers it grants is left largely abstract save for a post hoc lay summary on the theories of physicist Lisa Randall, dark matter, and parallel universes, coming to rest on electromagnetism as the driving force behind the story’s astral projection and precognition. The interpersonal relationships and friendships this mysticism or extrasensory perception facilitates are warm and welcoming even if there’s no solid ground for readers underneath it.
A vague supernatural tale hidden in ruminations on psychic photons.Pub Date: July 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-79230-560-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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