In this sci-fi debut, a graduate student’s ability to speak an alien language makes her essential to the prospective alliance between humans and the extraterrestrials.
Avery Alcott was born in 1993, the same year Earth had first contact with the humanoid Vardeshi. But the peaceful aliens left shortly after arrival, offering the vague reason that humans were “a volatile race.” More than two decades later, Avery’s professor Dr. Alistair Sawyer at a California graduate school offers her a unique opportunity. Having spent years translating the Vardeshi’s native tongue from various recordings, Sawyer teaches it to Avery. When the Vardeshi subsequently return, Avery is the primary choice for a cultural exchange. In fact, she won’t merely be living among them; she becomes a low-ranking member of their fleet for a one-year, round-trip journey to their home planet, Vardesh Prime. Acclimating to the Vardeshi aboard the ship, Pinion, is strenuous: It takes time for Avery to master nuances of language and customs. But the ship’s commander, Khavi Vekesh, isn’t interested in exchanging cultures, as he orders others not to converse in English with Avery. It’s soon clear someone on Pinion opposes a human/Vardeshi partnership and enacts a dastardly scheme to ensure its failure. In her series opener, Pechenick aptly parallels the human/alien relationship with the real-life diversity of world cultures. For example, in this book there are some, including certain groups on Earth, who protest the alliance while Avery strives to immerse herself in Vardeshi traditions without losing her own. The story’s steady pace meticulously develops characters, such as Zey Takheri; he shares the same low rank as Avery and becomes a loyal friend to the often lonely woman. Along with a touch of suspense (a threat to the ship and crew near the end), there’s humor: The aliens’ initial visit ultimately produced Vardeshi-obsessed fans, called Vaku, as well as popular Vardramas on TV. Though the narrative is predominantly in English, the author adds a few choice Vardeshi words and includes a glossary.
Thoroughly enthralling, thanks to humanity’s representative—a perceptive, tireless protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73231-230-2
Page Count: 490
Publisher: Ink Sigil Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
11
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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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
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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