A compelling, if sometimes-lurid, picture of a faith gone wrong.
In Tullius’ (Unlocking the Cage, 2017, etc.) first book of a planned series, a young man must decide whether to submit to his hellfire-preaching father’s plans for him.
Joshua Campbell nearly died at birth, but he rallied right after his father, Charles, promised that the infant would grow up to be God’s servant at their South Carolina commune. Joshua has been extraordinarily lucky ever since, walking away from numerous crashes and explosions unharmed. For Charles, the author of a book called The Lost Gospels and founder of The Church of His Son, every close shave is further proof that his son is a second Christ, come to judge the world. Last time, the “Messiah was weak,” Charles declares, and his new gospel is one of violent vengeance. As Joshua grows into a man, he prays for the world’s sins but struggles with his love of pop culture, alcohol, and women. His longtime friend Jeremy Ludlow draws him into a sleazy underworld of drugs and sex, but Joshua also gets a chance at traditional family life after he marries Jeremy’s sister, Danielle, and they have a daughter, Lily. Meanwhile, Charles, in cahoots with conservative senator and president-elect Burkhart, engineers a devastating scheme to fulfill his own prophecies. It all leads to a climactic, Quentin Tarantino–esque finale in which Joshua delivers a televised speech. Tullius crafts a plausible conspiracy plot in this novel, and he shrewdly reveals the dangers of relying on social media reaction as a sign of success, as in scenes of Joshua popping pain pills and swigging whiskey on the 47th floor of the church’s opulent new complex in Las Vegas, awaiting the results of a “Messiah vote.” It also offers a convincing depiction of an unholy partnership between politics and religion; The Church of His Son, for example, is portrayed as being part business and part theatre. However, there’s an unpleasantly macho feel to the novel, with its gratuitously pornographic scenes and the fact that most of the female characters serve only as objects of male fantasy.
A compelling, if sometimes-lurid, picture of a faith gone wrong.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Vincere Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
