A fast-paced, thoughtful adventure likely to please sci-fi fans.
In this sci-fi adventure novel, an interplanetary probe heading for Pluto reveals that part of the solar system is missing.
In Donovan’s debut, a provincial president of the United States relegates space exploration to the back burner when he orders draconian budget cuts to NASA. Fortunately, Jake Conrad, who heads up the New Horizons project, is allowed to see his mission through to fruition—an interplanetary probe two years out from a rendezvous with Pluto. Good thing, too, as Conrad’s team discovers an incredible anomaly in the Kuiper Belt on the outskirts of the solar system: The dwarf planet Eris and its satellite, Dysnomia, seem to be gone. The team soon discovers that the two planets have joined together to form an alien spacecraft, which aims to harvest the entire solar system, including Earth. The novel follows a diverse group of nine people as they’re brought together in an effort to save mankind. Donovan introduces each in his or her own chapter, creating sympathetic, three-dimensional characters without bogging down the narrative. Each is dissatisfied with their present-day life and yearning for more, and the New Horizons discovery provides each with their life’s calling. Along the way, three of the protagonists—Kate Runningfox, an intern for the Kuiper Belt Research Team; Mike Spence, a former Shuttle Commander, and Cecilia Behl, a microbiologist—ultimately help the aliens’ highly advanced artificial intelligence communicate with the people of Earth. Donovan’s prose is crisp, and the novel’s pacing is sharp, but there are a few occasions where the narrative stumbles. For example, some of her characters’ disdain for religion makes for some forced-sounding dialogue (“That’s what’s so great about this country. You have the freedom to handle this however you want. But what you don’t have is the right to force your views on me!”). At one point, an antimatter explosion creates a mile-wide crater in Texas, the government explains it away as a uranium “accident,” and, somehow, it only lasts a month in the news cycle. However, the overall story is so intriguing that readers are likely to shrug off any incredulity.
A fast-paced, thoughtful adventure likely to please sci-fi fans.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2013
ISBN: B00BEB5BDA
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
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
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