An unusual tale that combines environmentalism and action-adventure.
An action-packed environmental thriller that portrays the complexity of relationships and the effects of tragedy.
In Powers’ (Each Unique and Fascinating, 2012) newest novel, Ben and Frances Singleton own and operate OrcaSpeak, an orca-protection organization based in the Pacific Northwest. Although the Singletons are in love, their grueling work hours and financial stress have taken a toll on their relationship. Frances befriends gorgeous Selena Campbell, an aquatic biologist, at a fertility clinic and believes Selena and her boyfriend, another marine biologist, would make for a good alliance with OrcaSpeak. Frances arranges a meeting between OrcaSpeak members and the scientists, but she fails to attend when her path crosses that of Donal Hopkins, a longtime member of an environmental-protection group. After losing his family a year ago in a tragic accident during a protest, Donal joined the group’s new Special Operations Unit, which conducts radical missions designed to raise awareness of environmental issues. He does it to honor his family’s sacrifice, but his guilt and grief blind him to the dangerousness of the activist group, which tasks Donal with setting off fireworks on a passenger ferry during rush hour. For this ill-fated publicity stunt, he brings his guileless cousin, Roddy Jones, to help him. Predictably, the mission goes awry, and Donal, whose van stalls at an inopportune time, ends up stealing Frances’ car and kidnapping her in the process. What ensues is a dangerous adventure involving OrcaSpeak and the scientists; Donal and his unwitting accomplices; and the potentially violent activist group. While the tale could be trimmed, the plot speeds along, and the characters have interesting back stories that shape the way they approach their lives and each other. As the drama unfolds, Powers skillfully shows how each person handles loss, either real or perceived.
An unusual tale that combines environmentalism and action-adventure.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615656007
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Whidbey Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2013
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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