A riveting, well-judged blend of scientific discovery, mysticism, and personal development.
A young woman with a passionate scientific interest in frog toxins travels to the Amazon jungle and becomes a shaman’s apprentice in this debut novel.
Seventeen-year-old Francine Olivière Gagner of Portage, Michigan, never fit in with most kids, partly because she has hyperesthesia syndrome (she hates being touched, for example) and borderline Asperger’s. She does have a best friend in Melonee Hall; they have different interests, but both are of First Nations heritage. Walking late one night to Fran’s house, Melonee is attacked by Robert Rousch, a knife-wielding man who rants: “I hate you savages. You all need to be scalped.” Though he’s eventually convicted, he serves only a few years before being released. In the meantime, the two friends study martial arts for self-defense, graduate from high school, and share rooms while attending separate colleges. Fran receives a grant to study abroad in French Guiana, where she hopes to learn about poison-dart frogs and their biochemistry. She gets the chance to serve as an apprentice to a village shaman deep in the jungle, a difficult but enlightening process. Returning to the United States with valuable specimens, she—and her toxic frog—has a final confrontation with Rousch. In the first half of his book, Roach tells an engaging but meandering and episodic tale. The story really takes off in the second half with Fran’s intriguing trip to French Guiana. The tests she faces are considerable both mentally and physically, from adopting an unfamiliar tribal language and culture (such as being expected to stay put in a tiny hut during her period) to the shaman’s grueling teaching. Fran is always a scientist first, making her observations of shamanistic practices especially valuable. A satisfying ending ties all of the tale’s strands together nicely.
A riveting, well-judged blend of scientific discovery, mysticism, and personal development.Pub Date: July 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5320-8723-3
Page Count: 316
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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