Blazingly paced, exciting, and satisfying—an excellent futuristic tale.
A young scientist goes on the run when her work becomes the center of a deadly power struggle in this sci-fi thriller.
The Berkeley, California, of 2038 is so smog-ridden that few venture outdoors without an oxygen tank and face mask. For Jessila “Jess” Prentiss, 27, a post-doctoral student in chemistry, the biggest event she’s expecting as her day unfolds is a long-awaited rainstorm, the first in more than a year. When she gets a message from her ex-boyfriend and boss, David Steubingly, 54, asking her to visit, her Keeper (a digital assistant) warns against it. But Jess ignores the advice—only to discover on arrival that large men are beating David. They’re wearing windbreakers marked De Sel, a desalination company that California depends on to grow crops. Confused and in disbelief, Jess starts running, and over the next three days, she’ll barely stop. Matteo Wu, a young man, proves himself surprisingly willing to help; in fact, he’s being paid to track Jess and keep her safe, though he doesn’t know why. As he and Jess work to get off-grid, a difficult task in this well-surveilled world, the players in this chase reveal themselves as influential capitalist interests on the one hand and power-seeking radical environmentalists on the other. Both are interested in a cheap solution for desalinating water—a mystery to Jess, since her work involves wind technology. Deciding whom to trust and how to get out of this situation alive, with conscience intact, will challenge Jess on every level. Moschandreas (We Could Fall, 2015) offers many thrilling, cinematic episodes of capture, concealment, and escape in this novel packed full of telling details about a world 20 years in the future: rich in technology but poor in arable land, drinkable water, and breathable air. Her main characters are well-rounded and sympathetic—Matteo, for example, has a good reason for working at his somewhat shady job. The developing relationship between Jess and Matteo is also nicely handled, slotting in well with the heroine’s trust issues. It’s all capped off with a dramatic and believable finale.
Blazingly paced, exciting, and satisfying—an excellent futuristic tale.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-980313-52-6
Page Count: 277
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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