by Kelly Haworth ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 16, 2015
A clunky dystopian novel that tries to tell a story about love defying prejudice but fails to imagine it with any...
In her debut novel, Haworth creates a post-apocalyptic America where gender prejudice rules society.
Cloistered in the few cities that have survived in a world devastated by a major—and somehow forgotten—environmental disaster, the human race has also forgotten the concept of what a “woman” is. People born with the misfortune of two X chromosomes are called “Y-negatives” and treated as inferior, forced to have children via “surrogacies,” then sterilized and turned out into the world as “andros” who constantly shoot up with testosterone to emulate the dominating “mascs.” Class, status, and opportunity divide sharply along these gender lines, and heterosexuality is an aberration. The worldbuilding is heavy on dystopian detail but lacks a sense of logical continuity or believability beyond the immediate storyline. Why is the world like this? Nobody seems to know. Certainly not Ember, an andro who feels that he is really a masc, or Jess, a masc with a sympathetic nature and privileged upbringing. When the two start falling for each other while on a maintenance trip through the desolate wilderness of Arkansas, they find themselves struggling against society’s vicious prejudices as well as their own, in between repairing scientific equipment and fighting off “scavengers” from a mysterious settlement. The novel alternates between their first-person voices, and both Jess and Ember are unfortunately grating and frequently dim. Without brightly drawn characters or energetic voices, the story slogs through stale romantic incident and awkward, unsophisticated prose. Instead of offering insight into gender and sexuality, Haworth creates a world that has eradicated femininity without making a strong statement about why it chose to do so.
A clunky dystopian novel that tries to tell a story about love defying prejudice but fails to imagine it with any believability.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62649-334-6
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Riptide
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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