A bit familiar but exciting nonetheless.
In a future dictatorship, detective Victor Vale starts questioning authority when, to infiltrate a dissident cell, he goes undercover as a writer.
Readers may be strongly reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—not so much by any Bradbury-esque poetry of language, which author Kruvant refrains from imitating, but by the similar consumer-dictatorship milieu, a capitalist police state in which artistic/creative acts are potential threats. Welcome to the Nation, a harsh, isolationist future-USA after WWIII, purged of nonwhites and micromanaged under a stern, distant female president. There’s a yawning chasm between rich and poor: ubiquitous robotics have left the now-obsolete working poor as a mob of beggars and low-caste disenfranchised homeless; those lucky enough to be born into the “Upperclass” or the government or security forces now dwell and commute in high-rise splendor in the skies, their affluent lives benumbed by violent video games, celebrity gossip, nanotech-enhanced sex, kitschy movies, and, of course, personal virtual-reality Internet connectivity. Art and literature are fiercely discouraged because “Creators” tend to rebel against the system. Narrator Victor Vale, a rising police detective, is fortunate enough to be married to a beautiful lawyer, and he expects further salary bonuses with a major assignment: go undercover as a Creator to determine whether Sylvester Huppington—head of a rare surviving book publisher and widely perceived to be a government lackey—actually leads a clandestine cell of Creators. But Vale’s vulnerabilities, such as sympathy for the beggars and a growing fascination with the Creator world, jeopardize his mission and his family. A great deal of this material is by now Dystopia 101, and the language is often rudimentary—perhaps befitting the writer/protagonist’s deliberately dumbed-down culture and upbringing. (Amusingly, while Bradbury’s “firemen” burned books, here the Technological Police Force “liquidate” them with some kind of spray-solvent.) Yet the entertaining narrative minefield pops with surprises and grim echoes of our present, keeping the pages turning toward a downbeat conclusion. In this battle of anti-intellectualism vs. the humanities, guess who has the bigger guns.
A bit familiar but exciting nonetheless.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1942693178
Page Count: 280
Publisher: PanAm Books
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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