A melodramatic but engaging tale of resentment, redemption, and revenge.
A new-adult sports novel tells the story of a young man pulled back into the dangerous world of street hoops.
Troy Blake was not necessarily cut out for commercial fishing—particularly catching king crab in the freezing and stormy waters of the Bering Sea—but at least it’s keeping him out of trouble. Only a year ago, Troy was a freshman point guard on the Arizona Southern College basketball team. He moonlighted as “The Outlaw,” the star of the one-on-one Extreme Hoops League: “A hoops spectacle that rewards aggressive, in-your-face jams, where refs rarely call fouls, and hacking, charging, and fighting are key to a baller’s arsenal.” Serving on the fishing boat fulfills his probation for accidentally killing a player in a street game gone awry, though the aggression of some of his crewmates tests his new commitment to anger management. As his probation ends, Troy is hoping to go back to school and maybe pursue a relationship with a girl he meets in Alaska. But all his plans go out the window when he gets news from Arizona that his brother, Billy, has been murdered. Getting revenge will mean rushing headlong back into his turbulent past, and this time, if he kills someone, it won’t be accidental. West’s (Some Never Forget, 2017, etc.) prose is as fast and punchy as his protagonist’s game, as here, where Troy sizes up an opponent from a more privileged background than his own: “Probably went to some private school in Scottsdale. You’d bet your momma’s food stamps and your father’s epic Metallica record collection that Socks’ mother drove him to basketball practice in her fancy Mercedes Benz and made sure he always had the latest LeBron Zooms.” The plot is fairly ridiculous—Troy never wants to fight, but people just keep forcing him to defend himself. Even so, the dual macho subcultures of commercial fishing and street basketball make for compelling milieus. The result is a novel that is highly readable even if, in the end, it’s little more than an escapist fantasy.
A melodramatic but engaging tale of resentment, redemption, and revenge.Pub Date: April 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9895396-4-7
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Molon Labe Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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PERSPECTIVES
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