A layered, challenging fusion of genres.
A sci-fi debut about a biotechnologist, a blacksmith, and an odd biological phenomenon’s effect on history.
In 1999, biotechnology engineer John Samuel Weston runs the Haddonfield, New Jersey–based consulting company Haddon Life-Tech with his business partner, Bob Fenwick. One day, he wakes up in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden County, New Jersey, where he was admitted three days ago with an abscessed insect bite on his neck. Dr. Caldwell informs John that when he came in, he was dehydrated, delusional, and insistent that he “go back and save” an unnamed woman. Later, Bob’s wife, Katie, tells John that his partner was committed to the Lakeland psychiatric hospital after becoming obsessed with a secret project in his basement and some sort of “messianic mission.” Bob also suffered a severe insect bite while fishing the nearby Delaware Bay. The bites could be from greenhead flies bred by GenAvance, a company that John and Bob are courting for a biotech design contract. In a parallel plotline, set in 1774 Greenwich, New Jersey, an arsonist has been striking terror into the locals with a string of fires. When tragedy hits blacksmith Thomas Whitman, he joins forces with a Lenni Lenape Native American named Dan Fire Cloud and a slave named Isabel to find help from an unlikely source. In his debut novel, Goldhahn swings for the fences, combining complex historical and scientific themes. A deep reverence for history informs the colonial-era scenes, set on the eve of the American Revolution, which reveal such details as “Coffeehouses were enjoying a surge of popularity...as coffee was fast replacing tea as the politically correct beverage of choice.” Goldhahn also explains scientific terms well, such as an “epigenetic” phenomenon, which he describes as when “something from the environment...triggers the expression of the gene or genes.” Occasionally, narrative padding, in the form of travel details and trivia (such as the explanation of the phrase “Shay pah”), drains the momentum from an otherwise heady mystery. However, the bold ending makes readers’ investment in the characters pay off remarkably.
A layered, challenging fusion of genres.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9965551-0-4
Page Count: 534
Publisher: Rigel Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2018
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
