by Jonathan Cook ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 3, 2015
While serving large helpings of unfamiliar vocabulary, this post-apocalyptic novel still delivers a solid coming-of-age...
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In the far future, a young descendant of Native Americans embarks on a vision quest to discover his totem.
Little Owl, or Miintikwa, 17, lives along the Wabash River, where the fish are scarce and starvation looms. His people, the Peeyankihšionki, were spared when the fifth world ended long ago. An abandoned town, Waayaahtanonki, lies north and could be recolonized, but the area is considered ghost-ridden; to the south live the Ciipaya, an implacable enemy. Overwhelmingly curious about what lies north, Owl decides to head for Waayaahtanonki on a vision quest. He’s surprised and pleased when childhood friend Red Willow joins him; she’s a skilled hunter and warrior—and increasingly, unsettlingly attractive. A Ciipaya warrior seeking “the Lake Erie talisman” attacks the pair; Willow leaves Owl to escort the Ciipaya back to his territory. Journeying northward, Owl becomes astounded and puzzled by remnants of civilization: bridge pilings, buildings, glass. He decides to find the cove where his people emerged from the fifth world. There, he’s stunned and terrified to behold Mihšipinšiwa, “Underwater Panther,” but the underworld god grants Owl informative visions about how the last age ended. Owl faces several dangers and more revelations before he can return home with the knowledge to save his people. In his debut novel, Cook melds a futuristic post-apocalyptic story with a classic coming-of-age quest tale, adding interest with authentic details from Native American culture, such as herbal healing and arrow-making. Owl and Willow’s young love is fairly standard but warm. Cook depicts the Peeyankihšionki with appreciation for the tribe’s multilayered politics and offers some intriguing future history, though its mechanics remain somewhat murky. As are other elements: why would historical patterns repeat themselves so exactly thousands of years later? Are non–Native Americans simply evil? And the Native American words employed liberally throughout are big stumbling blocks for the reader. They’re long, of uncertain pronunciation, and many look much the same at first glance: Mihši-maalhsa, Myaamionki, Mihšipinšiwa, Mishiginebig, and Meehšimeelwia, for example.
While serving large helpings of unfamiliar vocabulary, this post-apocalyptic novel still delivers a solid coming-of-age adventure.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5174-6554-4
Page Count: 282
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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