A traditional vampire tale with an emphatic emotional core.
In this supernaturally imbued novel, a centuries-old vampire develops a rapport with a terminally ill girl who has the ability to see the evil in people.
Yelena Solodnikova needs blood for sustenance. It’s been years since her love (and the vampire who turned her), Marcel, abandoned her. Subsequent relationships with mortal men have been comparatively shorter as she continues to yearn for Marcel. But it’s Yelena’s distaste for killing that has proved to be her biggest burden. She feels such guilt over the people whose lives she’s taken that she regularly sees a therapist, Dr. Sloane, under the guise of having an eating disorder. One day, Yelena has a chance encounter with a 12-year-old orphan, Orly Bialek, a hospital patient with leukemia who may have mere months to live. The vampire is understandably fascinated by Orly’s drawings—scribbles, really, in which the girl can see others’ atrocious acts or desires. Later, at a special gallery, Yelena gets her hands on several of Orly’s scribbles, complete with corresponding names and graphic details of each person’s deeds. Now Yelena can feed and kill guilt-free, as the list includes a con artist, a rapist, and a serial killer. Meanwhile, she grows close to Orly and entertains the idea of fostering or even adopting her. But Yelena is once again distressed when debating whether she should make Orly a vampire; it may save the girl’s life, but could also afflict her with the same torment that has saddled Yelena for the longest time. Despite the vampire-laden plot, Tomoguchi’s (The Dead Girl I Like Heart and Stuff, 2015, etc.) character-driven story zeros in on the grounded and often bewildering human element. The mother-daughter dynamic, for one, is prevalent throughout. Neither Yelena nor Orly has a family, so their evolving connection is both convincing and endearing. But it’s a closer examination of various characters that truly fortifies the novel. Orly is initially terrified of Yelena, as her scribbled portrait of the vampire shows the girl a killer. Yelena’s vamp best friend, Hisato, acts as a constant reminder of her nature; he joins her as she takes out baddies but has no qualms about murdering innocents (for example, potential witnesses). Even more profound are the villains marked for death who, as it happens, are just as hard to read as Orly’s scribblings. Supernatural aspects are treated pragmatically; Orly’s ability is more a talent than a power. In the same vein, immortal Yelena can die if her head is severed, a staple of vampire lore. This flaw ultimately makes her vulnerable to a serial killer who has an affinity for beheadings. Tomoguchi tackles fairly dark subject matter, from domestic abuse to child molestation. Fortunately, the few instances of humor are vampire-related: When Yelena asks Orly whether she’d like anything to drink, the girl responds, “You have stuff that’s not blood?” The book’s latter half features surprising plot turns while the overall story, even at its gloomiest, remains enthralling. There’s a definite finality to the ending and, as this is part of a planned series, a few unresolved issues as well.
A traditional vampire tale with an emphatic emotional core.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-79974-1
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Ink Bleed Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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