A frightening, if flawed, tale about two mysterious plagues.
An employee works to save the world from a health crisis caused by his company in this debut eco-thriller.
In the near future, the world is beset by two strange and terrible plagues. The first, Idiopathic Infertility Syndrome, kills fetuses in the womb. The second, Multiple Organ Dysfunction Syndrome, causes organ failure in otherwise healthy people. Veregro, a massive company that manufactures seeds and insect repellent, has offered a million-dollar reward to anyone who can discover the cause of these scourges, and someone does: a Veregro tech named Randy Hall. But the company probably won’t like what he finds, as the cause is Veregro itself. Randy takes his findings to Veregro’s vice president for communications, Walter Conroy, a former researcher whose work predicted these epidemics 18 years ago. Walter, who recently lost his wife to MODS, begins to look into the matter, only to find out soon after that Randy has been murdered. Walter seeks out Charlotte “Lottie” Winters, a former Veregro lawyer with a checkered past who lives on a Marin County commune where MODS has not yet appeared. Walter and Lottie will have to race to stop Veregro before its products lead to the death of millions—and before the company deals with them in the same manner as Randy. Roy Mankovitz and Alan Mankovitz (a father and son team) tell their story in breezy but urgent prose: “Walter returned, sat down and poured himself some tea. The way Lottie was frowning at him suggested he wouldn’t be staying long. But how could she be angry at him? They were both after the same thing, weren’t they?” The characters are generally believable, as is the book’s terrifying premise, and the authors maintain an admirably brisk pace. This verisimilitude—in terms of the setup, if not the full narrative—makes for a thriller that is pleasantly anxiety-inducing, even as it travels along a fairly predictable track. Readers will turn the pages with their stomachs in knots, hoping that some biological solution can be found, even if it is preceded by some rather silly plot developments.
A frightening, if flawed, tale about two mysterious plagues.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9990994-9-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Weeping Willow Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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