A light-hearted, heroic hash of genres.
The cast of Kwatee (2005) reunites to retrieve microfilm stolen by Madame Lai, dreaded pirate queen of the South China Sea.
It’s 1954, and clairvoyant agents and soon-to-be-married couple Rick Reilly and Loo Tao-hua, aka Rick and Ricki, connive to attract the pirate queen’s attention with an elaborate con, putting word out that her film is fake and that they are in possession of the real deal–and offering it to the highest bidder. To this end, Rick and Ricki purchase a club as a front, and with Wiccan priestess Branwen Smythe reassemble a crack team from the Kwatee adventure. JD Chartier and his wife Anna, Homer Tingle and Benny Fink all converge on Macao to play their parts in the con. An ominous storm and forced crash landing, not to mention preternatural inklings on the part of our clairvoyants, suggest there’s more to the case than stolen film. In fact, there is something otherworldly about Madame Lai, whose touch turns brains to soup, and whose cohort, Captain Chen, unleashes centipedes on his victims. Covert operatives visit the back room of Rick’s Cabaré Americano where Ricki, also a part-time actress and singer, performs nightly. The con proceeds swimmingly. It’s spy versus spy in the alleys of old Macao–custom-tailored suits conceal pistols fitted with silencers, Rick and Ricki’s banter resembles The Thin Man’s Nick and Nora, and they run their operation with the cool of a Casino Royale James Bond. There’s even an inept duo of Chinese operatives named Yin and Yang, and a cop, Lt. Carlos Antonio Sebastian, who might have wandered in to investigate the surge of corpses popping up from unnatural causes. Downey’s book is epic pulp, blending fantasy, magical realism, intrigue and mystery, but descriptions and attempts at humor sometimes come off half-baked. The crescent moon, superimposing ominous horns over a mountain, is like “a letter C lying on its ass.” Smoke causes “a three-way cough-fest.” However, such turns of phrase aren’t entirely inappropriate in the off-kilter humor of a story that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Despite occasional stalls when characters recount, at length and without fresh information, events that have already been revealed, there’s much to engage and delight readers as this duo and their band sleuth toward the dark truth behind Madame Lai.
A light-hearted, heroic hash of genres.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4196-9086-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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