An engaging thriller, even as Carr weaves a perplexing web of conspiracies.
In Carr’s (A Place to Call Home, 2007, etc.) thriller, a family becomes the focus of two warring secret societies.
Wallis Jones, a divorce attorney in Richmond, Va., lives a quiet life with her husband, Norman Weiskopf, also an attorney, and their son, Ned, a 9-year-old genius. Their suburban bliss is interrupted, however, when their family becomes a key component in a war between the world’s two enormously influential secret societies, Management and the Circle. The history and reach of these societies is revealed in waves throughout the novel; ultimately, it becomes clear that these two groups shape every major political and economic situation in the world, and one or the other has been doing so since the late 1700s. Typically, these groups operate in ways that are either entirely covert or seemingly transparent that they appear to be beyond suspicion. However, a series of careless mistakes—and a mole secretly passing key Circle information to Management—leads to violence done to outsiders close to Wallis. The sprawling nature of the conspiracy creates a large cast of characters, many of whom disappear for long stretches of the narrative. Although this can be confusing at times, it allows Carr to illustrate how a range of characters is affected by these warring societies instead of just focusing on Wallis and her family. Nonetheless, the story’s most compelling moments involve Wallis’ family. She’s enlisted for help by a low-level member of the Circle, mostly due to her reputation as a tough, honest lawyer. Understandably, she’s skeptical at first, but as her friends and neighbors begin to die in supposed accidents, she can’t help but get involved. As shocked as Wallis is by the existence of these secret societies, the greater surprise is how close to home the conspiracy lies. So even as Wallis uncovers secrets that reveal the real reasons for global wars and why certain countries were colonized, her more emotional discoveries pertain to herself and her family.
An engaging thriller, even as Carr weaves a perplexing web of conspiracies.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1620304303
Page Count: 450
Publisher: MRC Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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