Part Back to the Future with slivers of an Inconvenient Truth, Frank’s debut science-fiction novel starts with a fatal accident and ends with social and environmental responsibility.
A successful advertising executive, 42-year-old Summer has had over a dozen years of stressful board meetings, aggressive negotiations and an impressive winning streak of international accounts. But her high-octane life plummets out of control as subordinates conspire, and memory lapses make her the target of office gossip. She needs a break, a true holiday and rejuvenation. At her boss’ request, Summer books a hiking trip to Alaska, intent on climbing cliffs and rediscovering her inner tiger. As night sets over the terrain, her mind wanders and her footing fails. She stumbles into a crevasse, where her body remains in ice for more than 70 years. With a stellar opening and the naturally compelling question of “what happens next?”, the novel unravels the intricate details of Summer’s second life after she is found and revived from the snowcaps. Her old world is dead, wiped away by human wars and natural disasters. People have retreated into the wild, carving out small villages that live sustainably close to the land. Food is grown in gardens, and communities function as families. Summer struggles in this world where no one keeps secrets, fast food is extinct and love begins to thaw her cold heart. While the first three chapters show great promise in terms of pacing and prose, conflict and science-fictional aspects of the story fall to the wayside. Readers will ask themselves why certain characters are introduced in detail and then simply dropped from the narrative. At several points, the story analyzes humanity’s culpability in its own demise. For pages, Frank dispenses a dissertation of synthetic foods, artificial preservatives, pollution and even the idea of “latchkey kids.” As a result, the story resembles a lengthy lecture of humanity’s irresponsible behavior rather than an exploratory journey through time. While science fiction often touches on these themes, this book lacks the dramatic drive of other futuristic tales. With an honorable message of sustainability and a compelling opening sequence, the book struggles to deliver the sense of wonder and discovery that often defines this genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615530369
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Vibrant Village Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2012
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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