by Rick Elliott ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 31, 2010
Unpolished but intricate and fun, even as the plot turns tragic.
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A terrorist sleeper agent has fallen in love with his adoptive country, but the arrival of other jihadists threatens to place him back on a dangerous path.
Two Pakistani jihadists are on a collision course in America’s Heartland. One is Yussef, a graduate student and the lone member of a three-year-old terrorist cell in Rockledge, Mo. The second is Jamal, who, accompanied by three other Islamic extremists, has only recently left Pakistan, hoping to infiltrate the United States through Mexico and then meet up with Yussef in order to launch an attack. Yussef’s time in America has changed him however, and the friendships he has made there, along with the affections of his modest, beautiful classmate Rachael, have turned him against the mission—an inopportune problem with the determined Jamal on his way. Elliott’s debut novel is surprisingly complex, never oversimplifying the shades of gray in which it operates; there is no demonizing Islam or holding America up as a guiltless victim—just people making good and bad decisions, either because of tragedies in their pasts or the personalities of those around them. The muted tension of Jamal’s inevitable arrival is magnified by the novel’s ability to endear itself through Yussef’s lighthearted moments, ultimately making the threat of losing them all the more heartbreaking. Character interaction is sometimes weak; inner monologue is where the story is most comfortable, one-on-one conversations between characters (particularly Yussef and Rachael) are strong, but anything more and the book’s dialogue becomes jumbled and cliché. A thriller at its core, a subplot involving the captain of the ship on which Jamal and his fellow jihadists were smuggled across the ocean supplies a little action until the novel’s final, violent crescendo.
Unpolished but intricate and fun, even as the plot turns tragic.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2010
ISBN: 978-0984600403
Page Count: 395
Publisher: Rising River
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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