An inventive puzzle of a novel by a writer of singular vision.
A teenager forges an impossible connection with a long-dead Swiss mathematician in Seurat’s debut novel.
Fifteen-year-old Ulrick Kennedy has been having nightmares. He’s a member of the paper airplane team at the elite Percival Lowell High School in New York, and he’s terrified that he’ll mess up in some way to prevent his team from making it to nationals. His father, Wall Street executive Harry Kennedy, is not pleased by his son’s slipping grades—nor by the fact that the boy cares so much about paper airplanes that he’s having stress nightmares. He’d much rather see Ulrick focus on his math studies and learn some skills that may one day serve him on the trading floor. When Ulrick and the rest of the paper airplane team lose a bet concerning the law of fluid dynamics to their eccentric math teacher, Professor Ross, they find themselves forced to take a makeup exam—one that Ulrick is willing to go to any length to pass, including buying and consuming a strange study aid called Altus Aerius Oculus (“High Altitude Eye”) from an apothecary in Chinatown. “The mixture is very selective in that it does not have the slightest effect on memory, but dramatically increases one’s analytical powers,” the woman at the shop tells him. “The active ingredient is a solution from an optic nerve of a Swiss mathematician, I forget his name.” At the same time, incautious traders at Harry’s firm find themselves targeted by the SEC over some blind bid trades that could potentially bring the whole business crashing down. Finally, back in 18th century Berlin, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler is desperate to solve the Great Theorem of Fermat at the behest of Frederick the Great. As time and space begin to converge, Ulrick finds he’s doing much more than studying the laws of physics—he’s accidentally defying them.
Seurat’s prose has a technical precision that complements the many physicists and mathematicians who populate the novel’s pages. He’s particularly adept at evoking the richness of Euler’s Berlin, a place and time in which astrology, science, and the caprices of philosopher kings exert their influences side by side. The author clearly enjoys exploring physical laws, logical paradoxes, and other reality puzzles—at times, the book can feel less like a novel and more like a giant word problem. There are three main narrative threads, all of which take a long time to get going and an even longer time to reveal how they are connected to one another. Fans of this type of cerebral storytelling will enjoy the book’s payoff, so long as they manage to stick with it over its nearly 400 pages. Along the way, they can look forward to unexpected plot twists, impressive evocations of setting and character, and a wry sense of humor—here, Frederick the Great practices the flute: “A shrill, squeaky sound cut through the State Room. It was a complete surprise; even the walls of silver and pink pattern refused to resonate the ugly shriek. His Majesty tried again; he lifted the flute slowly to his mouth, and with distrust blew into the mouthpiece.”
An inventive puzzle of a novel by a writer of singular vision.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2015
ISBN: 9780991323548
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Quadrature Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
