A strongly told, well-paced, inspirational story for Christians and nonbelievers alike.
A band of Christian warriors struggles to defeat an evil warlord in a post-apocalyptic America.
In the middle of the night in April 2012, the world ended. Attacked with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the eastern United States was destroyed instantly, and those unlucky enough to survive the assault were turned into zombies as a result of the poison in the air. In Knoxville, Tenn., a middle-aged man and a silent woman wander the streets. This unlikely twosome was brought together not only by the destruction around them, but by God himself. For Molly, belief in God was never an issue. Her faith was a large part of her pre-catastrophe life, and during this difficult time—even after a pipe crushed her throat and took away her ability to speak—she still believes. Kane, however, was an atheist when hell broke loose. With his family believed dead and all he ever knew now lost, he has no reason to believe, and barely any reason to live. God, however, has spoken to him directly, and now Kane is on a mission. Unfortunately, that mission involves taking on the sadistic, polymorphic Malak and his group of psychotic warriors called the Coyotes. Kane, Molly, an almost mythic 8-foot-6-inch, 500-pound ex-athlete named Courtland and various other crusaders for good must navigate this new world and escape the changing forms of Malak in order to establish a just society. These scenes of flight and conflict are perfectly, tautly rendered and aptly convey the fear and desolation of the ruined world. However, the reader must wade through periodic, barely concealed religious and political rants against hot-button issues such as public health care, welfare recipients and Islamic radicalism that distract from the story. In the opening pages in particular, it seems as if the book will give way to a series of authorial rants. With a dose of editing aimed at removing such passages, this book could become the first in an exciting series.
A strongly told, well-paced, inspirational story for Christians and nonbelievers alike.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463724023
Page Count: 279
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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