A sci-fi romp that’s vast in scale yet thoroughly playful.
A novel sees a woman shunted through time and space as two universes go to war.
Virginia Sun-Jones, a Korean American who goes by Gin, is enjoying Christmas with her family in Nags Head, North Carolina. Unseasonable warmth has allowed Gin; her husband, Alan; their daughter, Grace; and her son-in-law, Eric, to visit the beach for a picnic. When Gin catches an antique newspaper blowing in the wind, she notes the publication date of March 28, 1827. She then proposes a toast, but it’s interrupted by a thunderstorm, during which she finds herself mysteriously alone. She eventually meets a woman named Hope and learns that she’s been transported to 1827. Strangely, Gin still possesses a pearl that she found on the beach before the picnic. This legendary Cintamani pearl grants her desires for dry, clean clothes and much more when she asks to leave 1827 in search of her family. A sentience known as the Quantum Opposable Singularity provides Gin with a dragon called Hangul to travel further in time. Gin, despite a limited understanding of the cosmos, has been chosen to combat a disastrous Unwinding of the universe. Entities like Golaeth, who oversees the cosmic nursery, and Emperor Calaneris XXIII, who believes the cosmos is a labyrinth to be pruned, strive to control the chaos as two universes clash. In this sci-fi series opener, Rew (Erenarch Academy, 2018, etc.) fans her fiery imagination consistently throughout this time- and dimension-hopping adventure. Lines like “I have no eyes, but I can see wavelengths pulsing as if I still had an optic nerve they could travel” challenge readers to keep pace with genuinely alien tableaux. Strange characters, such as alien physicists Benrus and Ralff, have brightly sketched backstories that could carry their own novels, contributing to the tale’s episodic feel. And while “whole areas of space-time are being deleted,” Gin’s pearl and other MacGuffins that can do virtually anything lessen the plot’s overall tension. Grounded revelations regarding Alan, Grace, and Eric provide the emotional signal that cuts through lots of Doctor Who–style noise.
A sci-fi romp that’s vast in scale yet thoroughly playful.Pub Date: July 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73221-899-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sophont Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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