A delightful story that shows supernatural beings can be romantic—and also very funny.
Mars’ quirky cross-genre debut is a Romeo-and-Juliet tale with a vampire and an alien who meet when humans rebel against the extraterrestrials on Earth.
In 2025, an alien species known as the Staraban lands on Earth. With a warning that the planet is mere decades away from death, the Staraban promise to relocate humans to an alternative planet. Humans are understandably wary, and some form the Humans Against Relocation Movement, headquartered in California. HARM’s co-leader Jack Daniels, a hacker/blogger, has been gathering intel on the aliens. She’s also been a vampire for the past five years, although only her friend Aurora “Rory” Espinoza knows this. Hacking the aliens’ computers, Jack ultimately has a confrontation with Tarc, the Alien Relocation Cooperative commander. Like other Staraban, he’s virtually identical to humans, but Jack finds him especially alluring. Neither puts a lot of effort into resisting their mutual attraction, but trouble may lie elsewhere, as earthlings question the true motive of the Vrolan, the aliens who asked the Staraban to relocate humans. An abduction occurs, and the ensuing rescue demands that HARM and ARC work together. Although this prospective series opener gleefully tackles a variety of genres, Mars focuses primarily on comedy. The Staraban, for example, seem particularly fascinated by pizza, and Rory “tortures” an alien captive by stealing his French fries. However, other genres are equally discernible, from erotica (occasional explicit scenes between Jack and Tarc) to romance as their physical intimacy becomes something more. With aliens looking just like humans, some characters are indistinguishable; Jack eventually befriends Jill, who’s essentially the human version of the vampire. But Mars’ witty, dialogue-laden narrative begets standouts like Rory, who’s oddly immune to Jack’s vampiric glamour, and Hal, Jack’s readily available AI that, at some point, takes over Jack’s blog and proves surprisingly narcissistic.
A delightful story that shows supernatural beings can be romantic—and also very funny.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-951091-01-9
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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