Strong characterizations uplift a somewhat old-school SF/medical thriller.
In Cerrano’s debut novel, a girl with an incredible scientific secret seeks help from a skeptical security expert.
In New York City, a homeless young woman who goes by the nickname “Colors” tries to keep out of sight of surveillance cameras and pursuers. She attempts to purchase no-questions-asked protection from security expert and retired Army colonel Sam Hennessy. He initially doesn’t believe her paranoid accounts of being hunted for the world-shattering information she possesses, even after she gives him a fortune in cash. But other people’s deaths and his own encounter with a hail of gunfire change his mind. In other chapters, the plot goes back 12 months to the St. Louis household of retired professor Helen Merrick and her distant, workaholic husband, Joseph, a Greek-mythology buff and research scientist who’s so engrossed in a clandestine “Athena Project” that he largely ignores his own family. He even seems unconcerned with the fact that a young daughter, away in Africa, appears to have been abducted. Helen gets Joseph’s attention, however, when she announces that she has stage 4 uterine cancer. In the present-day storyline, Colors stubbornly refuses to reveal anything concrete about herself, her background, or her dilemma, so it’s a minor puzzle how the two plotlines fit together, but it’s one that won’t be too taxing for even casual SF fans. Cerrano’s novel should appeal to aficionados of Robin Cook’s medical thrillers (especially 2012’s Nano), although this book has more of an on-the-run chase narrative. The author also works hard to get into the mindsets and emotions of the desperate players, who aren’t sure whom to trust or how to protect loved ones. Cerrano’s spirit hearkens back to the days when such character-oriented SF material could be found in the fiction sections of mainstream magazines such as McCall’s.
Strong characterizations uplift a somewhat old-school SF/medical thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-67372-544-5
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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