by Mark Richard Taylor ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2015
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Seattle slackers accidentally gain superhuman powers of perception and space-time manipulation, causing an entirely different group of superior beings to wonder what exactly to do about them.
Taylor’s debut may sport a gonzo title, but it’s more like the sophisticated sci-fi satire of Kurt Vonnegut, mildly tweaked for Pacific Northwest sensibilities. Outside Seattle, five young college dropouts enjoy the slacker lifestyle—smoking dope, fiddling with computers, and working barista-level jobs. One of them, Uli, is a rogue biochemical scientist with a habit of experimenting secretly on his friends. His latest experiment—lacing their marijuana with a fancy offshoot of Ecstasy as a way to grow fresh brain tissue—goes too well. Suddenly, their brain waves amped enough to create radio interference, Tony, Kaitlin, Astrid, and Alan possess superhuman powers of perception, telepathy, bilocation, materialization, and dematerialization—things that might be considered dangerous if these youths were more than latter-day hippies with short attention spans and no ambition. Nevertheless, they catch the attention of virtually immortal, normally invisible cosmic entities, the ones who inspire legends of angels, leprechauns, faeries, tricksters, and Native American spirit-animals (including the assassin rabbit). These various supernatural, virtually immortal beings meet with the “new people” (as they call the newly gifted slackers)—whose godlike powers may just exceed their own—to assess what kind of threat the kids pose. Meanwhile, in addition to numerous (albeit never belabored) sci-fi inside jokes and Starfleet references, Taylor throws the bewildered reader several semiconnected plotlines: a mildly Ray Bradbury/Jack Finney–esque paranormal traveling circus; an insidious computer virus in the process of taking over and controlling all data technology; and illegal dumping of industrial waste (by one of the god-kids’ parents) that comes alive and evolves into a golemlike “purple dirt yeti” creature arbitrarily named Mike. By the end, most of these story threads are left dangling, suggesting either that Taylor has a planned sequel up his Seahawks-jersey sleeve or that Washington state slacker types, even granted possibly limitless superpowers, would rather just go surfing, have sex, and chill.
Postmodern ironic gods must be crazy—or just a bit lazy—in this wry, absurd, yet sophisticated sci-fi.
Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-30424-2
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Impossibly Small Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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