Strong female characters and social issues augment this medical thriller.
An ER doc seeks a cure for a virus seemingly targeting African-Americans, which puts her and her infant daughter at risk in Crickard’s (Another Five Patients, 2018, etc.) thriller.
Dr. Sara Sullivan is understandably worried about a rapidly spreading viral illness. The majority of those infected by the virus, called Labrador, have been in D.C., where Sara lives and works. Over 90 percent of African-Americans infected have died, and Sara, who’s biracial (her estranged father was black), and her baby daughter, Elyse, are in danger. After Sara treats patients possibly suffering from Labrador at George Washington University Hospital, the Department of Health forces her into a “voluntary quarantine,” though she’s asymptomatic. Sara believes there’s a cure, which she’s determined to find, especially when it’s clear millions may soon be infected, including Elyse, who’s showing signs of the illness. In fact, someone, rather suspiciously, has had a Labrador vaccine in development for years, well before most Americans had even heard of the virus. Meanwhile, racial tensions in the States are rising: Blacks think whites are getting preferential medical treatment, while whites assume the disease originated in Africa. Sara’s hunt for a cure ultimately exposes a sinister coverup that entails sabotage, kidnapping, and murder. While Crickard adeptly delivers thriller components (Sara dodges authorities after she escapes quarantine), she also shrewdly addresses serious issues such as racism and sexism. For example, Sara is a resilient protagonist who has endured racist comments all her life and encounters numerous patronizing men throughout the story. Even when her cop fiance (and Elyse’s dad), Marty Thompson, uses a pet name, “sweetie,” it’s somewhat condescending. While other similarly arrogant male characters are interchangeable, the women, in contrast, are memorable. For example, graduate research student Veronica Laughlin fearlessly says to a police officer, “Didn’t your mama teach you it’s not polite to point?” The author retains an energetic plot with Sara on the lam and provides a surprise or two as villains and motives come to light.
Strong female characters and social issues augment this medical thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9992059-2-1
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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