An imaginative, if sometimes tedious, look at the great beyond.
A supernatural novel focuses on the peculiarities of life after death.
Bruno (Pensacola Reset, 2014) presents Fiona Campbell, a protagonist who in the opening pages of this extensive story is dead. But readers need not panic, because Fiona’s adventure is just beginning. She continues to exist in a nontraditional afterlife. There is no heaven or hell and Fiona can traverse the earthly plane. The major change is that her body is gone and now she is an AtCon, short for atomic configuration. Fiona can speak to other AtCons telepathically and she can even create a holographic image of herself. Soon she comes into contact with an AtCon named Jonas Smith. Jonas is a slave who died in the 1800s and he has used his time as an AtCon to do everything from completing university courses to attending professional baseball games. Fiona meets other AtCons (who are able to form into groups called Pods) and, although being dead doesn’t seem quite so bad, a number of questions arise. Shouldn’t there be more AtCons around? Can the AtCons exploit their abilities for good? Although Fiona initially uses her new existence to confront a difficult past, her mission eventually becomes a matter of facing the future. All in all, the tale offers a creative take on the afterlife. Could it be that a number of invisible souls are congregating in the stands to watch major league baseball games? It is something to ponder, though much of the dialogue is not quite so thought-provoking. Characters, whether alive or dead, tend to say obvious things, as when Jonas compliments Fiona by communicating telepathically: “You have a phenomenal ability to analyze information and come to logical conclusions.” But while the text can be clogged with Pod meetings to discuss the AtCons’ next moves (boring meetings, it seems, continue beyond the grave), the book delivers a refreshing exploration of the possibilities in the hereafter. Now that Fiona is dead, she can do just about whatever she pleases. What will she achieve with such a privilege?
An imaginative, if sometimes tedious, look at the great beyond.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5233-0341-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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