Goth girl meets The Nutty Professor meets The Terminator.
Action and sci-fi go hand in hand as Jackson presents the high-octane adventures of a snarky teenage girl who sets out with her nerdy uncle to save the world from evil robots.
This raucous story charges out of the gate as misfit ninth-grader Jill Bash tells her class what she did for summer vacation—and a giant green eye peers through the window. Thus the stage is set for a fast-paced adventure, complete with secret agents and a government experiment that gives Jill superhuman strength. The capricious plot—which leaps from high school to the streets of San Francisco to a house in the country—is told mostly from Jill’s point of view, with italicized notes from Uncle Matt interspersed throughout. Angry because her hardworking parents have little time to spend with her, Jill, who wears combat boots with black-and-pink lipstick, is forced to spend time with Uncle Matt. She soon discovers that dorky Uncle Matt the accountant is actually a spy who does cool things, like jumping into the back of a speeding truck to battle the bad guys. Jill takes suburban angst to a whole new bratty level: she calls her uncle a “turd” and spitefully wipes boogers inside his car. Her voice doesn’t always sound like a young teen’s, as when she describes Uncle Matt’s new truck: “The truck roared like a showroom vehicle with a deep and steady push coming from its dual chrome-tipped exhaust pipes.” Likewise, as in plenty of action flicks, the characters’ witty banter can be unrealistically flippant during death-defying moments. For example, after a giant metal saw blade comes out of nowhere and rips through their car, Jill removes her earbuds and proclaims, “Beyoncé rocks!” The story doesn’t seem too concerned with deep characterization or even a plausible plot, but the nearly nonstop action still keeps the pages turning. Young teens who love zany adventures will want to check this one out.
Goth girl meets The Nutty Professor meets The Terminator.Pub Date: March 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4959-5913-4
Page Count: 162
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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