A promising, if chatty, first installment in a spacefaring adventure.
A sequence of clicks in otherwise mundane radio signals may indicate the presence of aliens on a Jovian moon in Donoghue’s (UMO, 2018, etc.) sci-fi series entry.
Aerospace engineer Kiera Walsh’s former roommate asks her to meet with a man named Ajay Joshi. He’s an accountant by trade, but he’s also an amateur astronomer who’s made a discovery that Kiera has trouble believing. Specifically, he’s found periodic clicking noises in readily available NASA recordings of Jupiter’s radio waves. Most people claim that these are merely interference, but Ajay surmises that the clicks, which occur in a pattern, are an alien broadcast to Earth from Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons. When Kiera peruses the recordings, she finds some validity in Ajay’s claims. She and fellow engineer Dante Fulton relay the information to billionaire Augustus Amato, whose company, A3rospace Industries, is focused on deep-space exploration. Amato responds by expediting a mission to Callisto; he suspects that if NASA makes it there first, there will be a coverup. Apparently, NASA has plenty of secrets, including a failed space mission to Callisto 23 years ago and the discovery of alien beings there, known as UMOs (“unidentified magnetic objects”). Soon, the race to Callisto becomes a tense standoff. Donoghue’s multigenre approach to his series opener is a triumph. Although it’s primarily science fiction, the story also boasts thrillerlike suspense (Amato is threatened with imprisonment at one point) and mystery (very little is known about the UMOs, which appear as light). Numerous characters evolve over the course of the story even though it’s only Book 1: Ajay turns out to be more than just an internet conspiracy theorist, and NASA’s chief administrator, Dennis Pritchard, begins as Amato’s ally, but circumstances change their relationship. The narrative is largely driven by dialogue—intelligent, engrossing discussions of such subjects as probe launching and how the UMOs’ behavior is akin to that of Earth’s bees. This approach results in minimal action scenes, but the ending promises further adventures with these well-drawn characters.
A promising, if chatty, first installment in a spacefaring adventure.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997614-2-7
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Leaping Leopard Enterprises, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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