A gritty, heartfelt novel with an authentic voice from an author to watch.
In Nee-Nee’s debut coming-of-age YA novel, the fates of two teenage boys diverge as they deal with the poverty and violence that surround them.
The book’s narrator, 14-year-old Brian, lives with his mother and older half brother, Jason, in Slowbomb—a dangerous, low-income housing project where delivery services won’t go and where “There are certain rules that we live by in order to, well, live.” These rules include turning a blind eye to sex-for-drugs transactions in the school hallways and never naming the perpetrators of beatings and killings. “This is what it’s like living in the projects, if you could call this living,” Brian narrates. With Jason’s help, Brian avoids trouble, using the street-smart survival skills that Slowbomb kids learn early, but things become especially difficult when his brutal father is in town. A talented artist, Brian works with little kids in a local sports program, has a girlfriend he loves, and hopes to help his hardworking mom move to a better neighborhood. But, because he feels resigned to spending his future in Slowbomb, he dismisses an opportunity to go to an arts-centered high school in Michigan. “We’re not meant to have more than this. This is as far as people like us go,” says Kenny, who’s on his own self-destructive trajectory. The relationships and daily struggles of the novel’s adult and teen characters ring true, as does the grimness of the world that they inhabit. The author consistently focuses on how life in Slowbomb is shaped by abject poverty. Intermittent descriptions of violence and sex are explicit but not gratuitous. At another point, Brian movingly remembers when he was a child and “ignorance was bliss”—when he rode in grocery-cart races, played around open fire hydrants in the summer, and sledded and made snowmen in winter. The tragedy that eventually overtakes Brian feels inevitable, and as he considers an action that could have irrevocable consequences, readers will become invested in his journey—and pull for him to succeed.
A gritty, heartfelt novel with an authentic voice from an author to watch.Pub Date: March 24, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 123
Publisher: La Maison Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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