by Joseph Nolan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 22, 2011
One superman’s bloody battles with negative power run amok.
Beneath the gore of Nolan’s first novel lies a morality play in which a shaman passes along 1,200 years worth of life lessons to his successor through a gruesome fight that only one can survive.
Young Pico becomes an immortal superhuman, and he must choose good or evil as his driving force. This moral choice is also a physical one, because he was made immortal by the magic of the wellsprings. Its power comes with an insatiable addiction that can be fed only by blood and mastered only by supreme mental control. Pico learns the necessary skills through the teachings of his mentor, Kani, first in person, then by written legacy, then through harsh experience on his own. His story is a tour of violence across an Earth-like planet peopled with familiar archetypes—early Native Americans, Celts, Christians—altered to fit that world’s supernatural conditions. Everyone is fodder for the predatory Sachems, an immortal race fueled by the wellsprings. Pico becomes the strongest of them, and must either emulate Kani and control his addiction so he can foster the world or succumb and consume the population. Either way, he must conquer his nemesis, Enos. Once Kani’s friend, Enos chose the dark path while Kani chose the light, and only one of them can remain. Nolan tells their story in a dispassionate narrative with revolving viewpoints. Although engaging, the book comes across like a flat horror novel, because the characters react shallowly, if at all, to continual—and often extreme—brutality. Squeamish readers may need to skim in order to follow the plot without being revolted by some descriptions. And technically picky readers will stumble on consistent misuse of “lie” for “lay” and canoe paddles referred to as oars. Fantasy fans will appreciate the heroic-quest flavor and credible worldbuilding. Anyone romantically inclined, however, will want to hear about the positive-energy wellsprings instead of just the negative ones. Given that the book may launch a series, stories about positive wellsprings may emerge.
One superman’s bloody battles with negative power run amok.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615554150
Page Count: 158
Publisher: ICURYY, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2012
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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