A wildly dramatic and distinctly anti-Islamic presentation of a battle for the soul of the world.
A fantasy novel in which Christian and Islamic forces square off as the end of everything approaches.
Debut author Doren presents the world of 2093 as trembling on the edge of the End of Days, as supernatural forces align to fight their final battles. On one side is the archangel Uriel—one of the Seven, a group of angels who chose exile from Heaven on Earth. They did so in order to defend mortals during the upcoming time of Tribulation, when Satan will have free reign on Earth for seven years; then, Jesus will appear to win the battle of Armageddon, casting Satan into outer darkness for 1,000 years. The Seven have pledged “to Fall in order to fight against the Dark and help protect the people of Earth,” and against Satan’s incredible power, Uriel and his teammates use mystic talismans, such as the Ring of King Solomon. Meanwhile, in the mortal world, a powerful Muslim Brotherhood organization called the Swords of Allah has conquered many countries around the world and imposed Sharia law on them; only eight countries still resist them, “but within these nations, even in America, freedom held only a slight edge.” The Swords of Allah are led by a man called the Mahdi, “the long-awaited savior of the Islamic people”; unless he’s stopped, he’ll spend the seven years of the Tribulation fulfilling “his ultimate goal of destroying the Jews and Christians, and converting the world’s entire population to Islam.” Doren makes effective dramatic use of his admixture of Christian and Muslim folklore and eschatology, adding some Islamic elements to the superstructure of Apocalypse-oriented fiction. He also includes some action-adventure stock characters, such as Staff Sgt. John Bennet, which further flesh out the cast. Overall, he has a good sense of dramatic pacing, smoothly telling his story from shifting third-person points of view and in multiple locations as it builds to a climax. Some of his interpretations of Christian folklore, however, may strike some Christians as puzzling; for example, the author’s choice to render some of the supernatural scenes in a comic-book style (Hades’ “eyes bulged in terror when Jesus grabbed him firmly by the throat and slammed him to the ground”) may strike some readers as a bit odd. Far more problematic, however, is the story’s contention that it was Lucifer, not Gabriel, who tutored Muhammad. The third-person narration makes other distasteful insinuations, such as that “The Muslim Brotherhood gained its most significant foothold in the U.S during…the Barack Hussein Obama administration. Then-President Obama made it clear, after bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia, that he would throw his full support behind the Islamic world.” Some readers of the Left Behind series and other End Times–related fiction may take issue with these kinds of direct political statements.
A wildly dramatic and distinctly anti-Islamic presentation of a battle for the soul of the world.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950877-09-6
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Mystic Otter Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2020
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
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
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