An energetic novel featuring an antagonistic public figure.
Reichwein’s (A Different Kind of Fire & Fury, 2018) fictional thriller features real-life conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer as a character who teams up with an FBI agent.
FBI Agent Maria Quintana-Deon is on the scene after a devastating explosion at Cellular Telecom &Telephone Communications in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “Comrade Angela,” the military commander of the Peruvian terrorist group Shining Path, takes credit for the bombing on the group’s behalf in an email to Laura, adding that they have also abducted CT&T CEO Tom Yust. For Yust’s safe return, the group demands $100 million and the head of the Los Lobos drug cartel. For good measure, Shining Path’s operatives free their incarcerated member Sandra Ochoa Ramos from her prison transport. After tracking the group to Peru, Maria gets help from Laura, Drug Enforcement Administration agent Don Lopez, and Maria’s trained German shepherd, Lucky. Maria soon learns of her surprising link to Sandra, which also connects to Maria’s estranged father, DEA agent Juan Quintana. Unfortunately, Comrade Angela, Sandra, and others are well aware that Maria is chasing them. It turns out that Shining Path has a U.S. agent on its side, and they may target someone Maria loves, such as her mother, Jeannie, in Santa Fe. Although Reichwein’s tale appears intended to launch a Laura-centric series, Laura shares lead duties with Maria here. The book’s cast includes some memorable players, such as the ferocious Sandra, who totes a pink AK-47. The story keeps up a rapid pace with succinct chapters told from the first-person perspectives of myriad characters, although these sometimes confusingly drift into third-person. There’s also occasional far-right social commentary, as when Laura fights her ban from social-networking service Jitter; this mirrors the real-life Loomer’s permanent Twitter ban, which occurred in 2018 after she directed a series of anti-Islamic tweets at U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar. (In the book, Jitter is said to be “partially owned by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.”) According to Reichwein’s website, “part of the proceeds of the novel will be donated to [Loomer’s] journalistic work.”
An energetic novel featuring an antagonistic public figure.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5136-5425-6
Page Count: 257
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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