An engaging story that punches, kicks, and takes flight, just like its heroes.
Carriker evokes comic-book action and disturbing current events in this debut novel.
Rusty longs more than most for the heady early days of superheroes. When he was a child, a mysterious event called the Shift granted some people superpowers, and unaffected Rusty was fascinated by them. But as years went by, things changed. The new heroes were outlawed by a fearful public who deemed superpowers (and vigilante activities) to be a net detriment to society. But echoes of the Shift were still felt in the post-hero world; soon, Rusty’s own superabilities appeared—the power to manipulate magnetic fields—but they seemed to cost him more than they gave him. Growing up gay and superpowered in north Texas, Rusty faced bigotry, but he was mostly happy, and even now, he still believes in heroes. So when a friend named Kosma—whom he was just starting to get to know online—disappears in Odessa, Ukraine, Rusty can’t let it lie. He also tracks down his idol, the hero known as Sentinel, to help him in his search. It feels like an unlikely partnership, at times, but people who fall through the cracks need heroes to band together to pull them out. This novel’s effective, understated worldbuilding is a treat, and the action is tight and fast-paced, but it’s the characters that really make the story exceptional. Rusty’s bright, colorful disposition is a welcome change from the grim, brooding countenances that often dominate modern superhero tales. That optimism makes the story’s harsher realities even more affecting. Readers also get to know a diverse ensemble cast, such as Rusty’s best friend, Deosil, including their hopes and fears. The alchemy between the characters’ chemistry, the story’s action, and the world’s pressing—and sometimes painful—similarities to our own make the book nearly impossible to put down.
An engaging story that punches, kicks, and takes flight, just like its heroes.Pub Date: April 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59021-520-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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