A fast-paced adventure that will excite lovers of anime and comics, but one that trades wider appeal for complex mythology.
In Cheung’s novel, a man’s boring life is interrupted by a gang of immortal bounty hunters trying to take his soul.
Every day, Leon Zylo, “gets off work feeling a little more dead than the day before.” Even his beautiful, loving girlfriend, Rachel, and the tantalizing sights and sounds of Fortune City, the sprawling “megatropolis” where he lives, aren’t enough to combat the apathy brought on by his boring office job. One day, he’s awakened from his lethargic existence by loud bangs at his door. A stylish man named Kitsune informs him that he’s been “contracted.” A gang of “Baya,” known as the Immortal Aces, will be coming to kill him in 24 hours: “The last day of your life starts after the next sixty seconds,” Kitsune says. Leon receives an official-looking contract that explains the rules, but it doesn’t reveal what a Baya is or why this is all happening. He largely ignores it, and the next day, he finds himself the prey of a pack of “[s]ome super invincible league of assassins who dress like pompous jerks.” He struggles through daring street chases, hops on roofs, and evades his pursuers on speeding trains before realizing that the bounty they seek is more than his life itself—it is his very soul. Soon, even more dangerous hunters are drawn into the chase, and Leon makes a daring choice that leads him to the truth about the Baya and their mysterious powers. Cheung’s prose is reminiscent of a comic book: short, punchy sentences propel exciting moments of action and complement his amusing, pun-filled dialogue. The clever conceit at this thrill ride’s core—that the more Leon tries to stay alive, the more valuable his life becomes—turns the cat-and-mouse game into a concise metaphor for urban ennui. However, halfway through, Cheung boldly goes in a surprising new direction, developing the lore of the Baya and leaving behind some of the more intriguing and universal elements. The author continues to maintain an exciting pace, but something special gets lost when he delves too deep into the fantasy.
A fast-paced adventure that will excite lovers of anime and comics, but one that trades wider appeal for complex mythology.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0692399125
Page Count: 404
Publisher: SmoothOperratus
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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
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