A loving, if uneven, tribute to an era that may resonate with readers who wish to return to its heady, idealistic days.
Gould (Let's Play Ball, 2010, etc.) tells the story of three young women caught up in the turbulent rock-music scene of the late 1960s.
Candy Collins, Hope Witmer, and Theda Brooks are high school students in suburban Maryland who witness the beginnings of a student rock band called Homegrown. Preston Andrews, the brash leader, plays guitar; the more reserved Neal McNab plays electric piano; and football player Brad Callahan plays drums before he’s replaced by Clive O’Dell. After the band receives an invitation from Apple Studios to audition, the girls accompany them to London. Shy, bookish Candy sees the trip as a chance to get closer to Preston, while Hope and Theda see it as an adventure with their boyfriends, Neal and Clive. Apple Studios is in disarray, but the band plays backup there for a famous folk singer, Ty Leahy, morphing his acoustic sound into something more electric; the girls also finally get a chance to help with the songs. The band renames itself AMO and opens a show for the darker, edgier band JPJ. After disaster ensues, they flee to Clive’s cousin’s commune in northern Scotland. The cousin, Father Flanagan, is a radical, pacifist priest who engages their spiritual sides. He officiates the couples’ marriages before the band tries to make it big in Los Angeles, where they connect with “Pretty Boy” Floyd Worth, a radical UCLA professor who’s also the promoter of a big music festival. Gould mostly does a fine job of keeping the plot fast-paced and engaging, with plenty of plot twists along the way. However, the characters could have been more fully developed and given more complex motivations. The prose is very dialogue-heavy, which sometimes bogs down the story. Era-specific details provide nice touches, but Gould’s descriptions often don’t give readers a clear sense of place, despite the diversity of locales. The reverence that the characters all have for music, however, is infectious, and it will likely be enough to keep most readers engaged with this novel until its end.
A loving, if uneven, tribute to an era that may resonate with readers who wish to return to its heady, idealistic days.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4917-4543-4
Page Count: 290
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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