An uneven post-apocalyptic story that wavers between the usual depictions of survival and horror but doesn’t successfully...
In the aftermath of an abusive marriage, a woman’s search for peace forces her into a primeval new world.
After being shot by her abusive husband, Robert, Sarah Robinson moves to St. Louis with her two daughters, Jazz and Janie. Sarah, who suffers from PTSD, has violent nightmares. Regular meditative sessions with Asha, a Kenyan spiritual teacher, are her only respite. One of these dreamlike sessions leads her to confront the Storm that rages within her, and aided by Asha’s own inner white light, she summons her avatars—the Horse, the Bear, the Elephant, and the Tiger—and contains the maelstrom. Upon awaking, she discovers the Storm was real, claiming not only her teacher, but also buildings, roads, and all other trappings of civilization, replacing it with grassland and non-native flora and fauna. Men, women, and children are left frightened and naked in this new world, yet Sarah finds herself renewed, her animal spirits healing her and giving her supernatural strength and speed. Using survival skills learned from her mother and passed on to her daughters, the trio rallies other survivors into a makeshift “Family” of hunter-gatherers. But not all members of the Family are trustworthy, as Tony, a manipulative misogynist, seeks to become King and force Sarah into submission. Lips’ debut traverses a lot of ground and struggles to find its tone, starting strong with horrific imagery and uneasy suspense then meandering into survivalist tedium. The immediate aftermath of the Storm’s carnage is impressively frightening: The elderly’s pacemakers and prosthetic hips disappear, loved ones in basements are left sealed underground, and twisted bodies line what were once roads after all cars suddenly disappear. But the vigor with which Sarah embraces this new world and the heavy focus on the technical aspects of survival strategies make these early horrors largely forgettable. Magical happenings abound in the novel, and there is a charming whimsy to the way Sarah’s inner creatures become real. But as satisfying as this is, no other characters are explored deeply enough to have similar growth, making them props.
An uneven post-apocalyptic story that wavers between the usual depictions of survival and horror but doesn’t successfully integrate them.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9980325-0-4
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Elliptic, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2019
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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