A series opener that skillfully balances sobering ecological facts with fanciful galactic adventures.
A YA space opera sees a princess step toward her destiny as an interstellar savior.
In the Andromeda Galaxy, Princess Warrior Nella Grizel Reiner of the planet Centaurius has just turned 1,800 spiral rings in age. Nella, roughly equivalent in development to an 18-year-old earthling, has been commissioned by King Montrobius to command a mission to Earth, the mirror planet of Centaurius. The princess, along with her protector, Konan, and members of the Fur and Feathered Warriors (including the birdbot Cluck-Cluck), travels on her ship, the Phoenix. Their assignment is to stop the terrorists Zennibar and Abigor (of the Whirlpool and Fireworks Galaxies, respectively) from releasing a dangerous captive entity called the Red Brume. Created by the wizard Jarvis, the Red Brume was designed to “educate intelligent life forms of the catastrophic results of greed, hatred, and war,” but “something went wrong.” Meanwhile, on Earth, Allen Killian McBride is Nella’s warrior twin, prophesied by the Book of Twenty (“the Bible to the Universe”) and with whom she’ll join forces. Allen’s stake in the matter is nothing less than Earth itself, which humanity has pushed to the environmental brink. He and Nella must stop Zennibar and Abigor so their galaxies can one day peacefully merge into the New Milkomedia Galaxy. Though McGarry (Echoes of the Mind, 2017, etc.) opens her adventure with the harrowing murder of a gorilla family in Congo, the tone softens, inviting fans of space epics like Star Wars along for the ride. There’s an enjoyable profusion of gadgetry and lore embedded in every page, from brain chips that animals use to telepathically communicate to the Wooden Warriors—talking trees—of Wethersfield. This first volume in a series brings a tremendous amount of backstory to light, including Allen’s birth and Nella’s training. But the focus always returns to the plight of Earth, where oceans will rise, “regardless of any future efforts...to curb greenhouse gasses.” Occasionally, gaffes appear (like “emancipated” instead of emaciated), but they don’t detract from a bighearted message.
A series opener that skillfully balances sobering ecological facts with fanciful galactic adventures.Pub Date: April 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-281602-1
Page Count: 182
Publisher: SJM Unlimited Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2019
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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