A bumpy roller-coaster ride that delivers thrills and serious issues.
A conspiracy thriller offers a look at politics, journalism, and the fate of the American experiment.
Paige Turner is the epitome of a hungry reporter. An investigative journalist with her own weekly TV show, she hits well above her weight class and is dogged in looking for the people responsible for America’s disquieting surveillance apparatus. Paige’s character is a familiar archetype, but her voice is charming and she could easily go toe-to-toe with any number of hard-boiled protagonists, keeping readers alert and intrigued as much as she does her own enemies and allies. But when Paige receives a package describing a secretive billionaire, known only as the Architect, and his plot to install himself as the supreme power of the United States, she may have finally bitten off more than she can chew. At the same time, the Architect’s cabal races to patch the leaks in its ranks, and to prepare for the execution of the vital first stage of its leader’s plan. Paige makes rapid preparations to go public with the Architect’s frightening scheme. But when people involved, including those close to her, start winding up dead, she has to confront the fact that whatever she does, the cost may be too high. The only question is whether that cost will be paid by her or by the nation and the entire world. The plotting is especially strong here, sure to delight readers with twists and turns that make the novel easy to pick up and much harder to put down. Unfortunately, Jaffe’s (The Invisible Enemy, 2012, etc.) prose isn’t quite at the same level, with some typos and awkward phrasing distracting from the story: “you’ve attempted to tank the world economies, threating the Architects strategy...must I go on listing your stupidity?” Still, the tale earns a lot of credit for its timeliness, invoking questions about the limits of the American government’s power, the efficacy of its checks and balances, and the fragile state of journalistic institutions the world over.
A bumpy roller-coaster ride that delivers thrills and serious issues.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9819410-5-9
Page Count: 479
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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