A turbulent but well-handled time-travel/aviation/drug-crime thriller.
In McFarren’s (Twisted Threads, 2017) sci-fi novel, a stunt flier has an opportunity to change her parents’ tragic history after she’s thrown back in time.
In 2013, Skylar Haines is a troubled, self-harming 16-year-old orphan living with her wealthy but emotionally cold grandfather. After her best friend is murdered in a carjacking, she summons the nerve to run away from home and get a job doing the only thing that makes her happy: doing stunts as a daredevil pilot. One day in 2018, while performing a perilous routine above Reno, Nevada, the young aviator soars into a thunderhead and mysteriously finds herself cast back into 1997—the same year that her pilot father, Dylan Haines, whom she never knew, died during a drug-smuggling caper. Skylar meets him straightaway, although he, of course, doesn’t recognize her. As she watches the tragic events of history play out, she realizes that she’s been deceived about what really happened. Can Skylar change the fate of her ill-starred relations? McFarren combines elements of paranormal time travel with a fast-paced crime story starring an especially agonized heroine. Many readers will likely be attracted to this tale featuring a forceful, time-tripping female protagonist. The narco-thriller element of the novel, with its head-spinning revelations, betrayals, and secret identities, might have worked better without the time-warp twist, which sometimes becomes a distraction. At one point, for instance, cops are conveniently (and oddly) lax about checking into Skylar’s background even as they use her as an informant. However, the author does pilot the complex plotline to a satisfactory landing—one that begs a comparison to the more mystical musings in Richard Bach’s equally air-minded New Age yarns.
A turbulent but well-handled time-travel/aviation/drug-crime thriller.Pub Date: May 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-137479-9
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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