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
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
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