A good, meat-and-potatoes space-opera adventure.
In Jucha’s debut sci-fi novel, a bright, pragmatic starship captain from a far-future human-colonized world finds his life changed by an exciting, ominous discovery in deep space.
After many years of collecting ice asteroids with his explorer-tug-ship Outward Bound to support New Terra’s expansion, Alex Racine undertakes a very dangerous maneuver to find a derelict starship called the Rêveur, built by humans more advanced than those in his own society. It turns out that there are survivors aboard the ship who’d been in suspended animation since an attack left their vessel drifting in the void. These people, the Méridiens, are led by Renée de Guirnon, who tells Alex of their highly advanced enemies aboard a strange silver ship. The friendly but somewhat introverted Alex, with the aid of the Rêveur’s sarcastic artificial-intelligence computer, Julien, decides to help the Méridiens make their craft space-worthy again and get home. Along the way, Alex comes to know and care for Renée, learns about the Méridiens’ way of life, and puzzles out some of the mystery of the silver ships and the aliens controlling them. Overall, this book is straightforward fun. The characters are sympathetic and entertaining, if a little thin—although none of them seem intended to be much more than fun, action-adventure personalities. Alex himself is likable enough, if perhaps a bit too perfect, but light sci-fi is often built on such idealized characters. The plot is straight-ahead and quick-paced with plenty of action, and the clear-cut, descriptive, but stylistically neutral text keeps things moving. If there are underlying literary themes, they’re slight, submerged, and kept out of the way of readers’ fun. The story is just grown-up enough to avoid a young-adult tag, but it steers clear of anything that’s stereotypically adult. As is de rigueur for the genre, it’s the first installment of a planned series.
A good, meat-and-potatoes space-opera adventure.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0990594024
Page Count: 306
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 20, 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
BOOK REVIEW
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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