by Michael Logan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 9, 2015
If it all sounds slightly bonkers, it is—but Logan’s unique combination of bombastic action sequences, off-kilter...
The stakes are raised when opposing forces threaten all-out war in the midst of the zombie apocalypse.
Scottish journalist Logan (Wannabes, 2014, etc.) returns to the gore-filled world portrayed in his debut, Apocalypse Cow (2013). This is very much a novel about getting the band back together, at least those members of the motley crew who managed to survive the first go-round. To recap, a botched attempt to create a bioweapon created zombie cows in Britain in the first book. Now the outbreak has spread to humans, though the zombies it creates are more Invasion of the Body Snatchers than traditional monsters. “Extreme cases aside, the virus seems to have translated into more arguments, a lot more sex, and an inability to queue. They’d become Italian,” Logan writes. Journalist Lesley McBrian’s bestselling memoir of survival lands her a gig with the New York Times. She soon discovers a plot among the American, Russian, and Chinese governments to initiate “Operation Excision,” which intends to eradicate the infected Brits, along with aid workers, with a one-two punch of nerve gas and neutron bombs. Lesley and her source are duly kidnapped and dumped back in Great Britain. Teenager Geldof Peters travels from Croatia to Scotland under the protection of mercenaries hired by his grandfather. Young Ruen Peat has come under the protection of Fanny Peters, a social activist and Geldof’s mum. Fanny and her people have discovered that although they're infected, they've been able to fight off the effects through meditation, dope smoking, “combat yoga,” and sex. Finally, the U.K. prime minister, Tony Campbell, has decided that if there’s any threat to his country, he'll use his last intercontinental ballistic missile to spread the disease worldwide.
If it all sounds slightly bonkers, it is—but Logan’s unique combination of bombastic action sequences, off-kilter characters, and wild-eyed scenarios should please fans of speculative fiction and horror alike.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06165-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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