An action-packed conclusion to a sci-fi series that mostly satisfies.
A struggle to defeat a power-mad clan leader and his sinister brother reaches the crisis point across three worlds in this final installment of The Weir Chronicles.
Earth’s counterpart, the parallel world of Thrae, has had its core almost entirely drained by Duach leader Aeros and his Pur brother, the Primary. Wracked by earthquakes and volcanoes, Thrae is running out of time. It’s up to the three Heirs—Earth-dwelling Ian Black, Thrae’s Jaered, and Patrick Langtree, the son of a Duach rebel leader—to work together to save Earth from the same fate. Patrick has only just learned that he is a Weir, a steward of the Earth who wields magical powers. The three Heirs are not alone: Their formidable mothers, Gwynn, Sophenna, and Eve, are on their side, along with Rayne Bevan, a potent Weir (and Ian’s star-crossed girlfriend). Rayne is able to drain the magical core of any Weir who touches her. While Ian and Rayne return to Thrae to evacuate the population—and ask the planet’s most fearsome creatures for aid—Patrick and Jaered scheme to steal the Primary’s hoard of wealth, suspecting he’s trying to smuggle it from Earth to a third parallel world, Smara, to start over again in style. As if that’s not enough, they realize that to truly defeat Aeros and the Primary, they must break the Curse that keeps their followers, the Pur and the Duach, apart—but how? Duff’s (Off Beat: Nine Spins on Song, 2017, etc.) sci-fi series has gotten better with every book, and that’s true in this fifth volume, too—she jumps right into the action with a fast-paced escape and rarely lets up. Her characters trot across three globes, with the scenery changing from Paris to Brazil, from the North Pole to the Bermuda Triangle. And she writes intense, propulsive fight scenes—there’s an unforgettable image in the climax of a dragon versus a squadron of fighter jets. The stakes are sky high, with planets in the balance, but there are smaller stories too, like Ian and Rayne’s romance, stymied from the start by their inability to touch without her sapping his powers. Duff ties these tales up neatly as well. But it’s unfortunate that her female characters get short shrift in the end.
An action-packed conclusion to a sci-fi series that mostly satisfies.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9970156-8-3
Page Count: 249
Publisher: CrossWinds Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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