A nice addition to the series with all the same strengths as the original.
Miller (Gravity Breaker, 2016, etc.) picks up Tallah Williams’ story in this second installment as she uses and abuses her gravity-controlling power in an attempt to fit in to—or remake—the world she lives in.
As the story opens, 20 years after the events of Gravity Breaker, Tallah is no longer a young teenager alone in the world; she’s a powerful woman who built a new city out of the Florida wilderness for African-American residents. But when Tallah’s childhood friend stabs her, Miller flashes back two decades to show readers how things got to this point. It begins with Tallah living rough, alone, in San José, California, learning the limits of her gravity-controlling powers and experimenting with rendering things invisible by manipulating a thin coating of dust. She carries this dust with her and even names it, which shows just how alone she is. Then she meets Harmony, an older teen who likes drugs, the environment, and having fun. But after Tallah reveals her powers to her, Harmony hatches plans involving career criminals, which drives a wedge into the girls’ friendship. Later, feeling betrayed and aimless, Tallah destroys part of a national park and ends up founding the city of Fort Mose, named after the first free African-American settlement in America. But founding a city comes with its own problems and dangers, leaving Tallah with the same question: where—and how—does she belong? As in Miller’s first book in the series, the protagonist is engaging; she’s flawed and believable while still maintaining a fundamental relatability. Again, the sci-fi elements are grounded in heavy, timely societal issues; here, they involve race and gender, with Tallah as an African-American woman trying to survive in a system that's stacked against her. The time frame occasionally slows down or jumps forward—years of Tallah’s life are covered in a few paragraphs—but the prose is mostly smooth and controlled. The ending promises another installment as well as something that will change the story’s fictional world.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5394-9590-1
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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