A science-based plot and first-rate protagonist remain both plausible and riveting.
Following a breakthrough with a formula, a California scientist suddenly finds herself the target of mysterious figures in this debut thriller.
Dr. Susan Glasser is taken aback when her lawyer, Russell Harris, makes it clear that she’s financially strapped. She certainly doesn’t want to sell her company, Glass Biotechnology, especially since the lab’s research in anti-idiotypic antibodies is just now showing positive results. Unfortunately, a break-in at the lab sets her back—the animal test subjects are all missing, presumably the work of activists. Since she can’t afford to delay the trials of her formula, GI-80, Susan injects herself with the drug. She gradually notices changes in herself—she’s faster and stronger—while troubling events unfold around her. Susan spots a car that’s unmistakably following her, and someone breaks into both her gym locker and her mother’s apartment. Things take a turn for the worse when a body winds up at her lab and law enforcement starts looking at her as a possible homicide suspect. It’s apparent someone wants GI-80. Since the culprit could be Susan’s former employer, Avery Biogenetics Corporation, any one of her lab researchers could very well be providing inside information. Though the eventual discovery of the drug’s specific effect is sci-fi–ish, Susan’s scientific approach (constantly examining herself for physical changes) keeps Matthews’ tale grounded and believable. The same applies to Susan’s hiding from anyone trailing her; she wisely changes her appearance based on popular fashions and hairstyles. The narrative is appropriately concise and pragmatic; in one scene, Susan works on establishing an alternate identity, debates her next move, and theorizes how the GI-80 biologic is functioning. The novel’s latter half includes a love interest for Susan who’s both surprising and convincing. This prefaces a strong final act that, though laden with solid twists and a thorough plot resolution, feels like it’s sprinting to the end.
A science-based plot and first-rate protagonist remain both plausible and riveting.Pub Date: July 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73208-410-0
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Piggyback Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
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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