While the storyline is more than a little convoluted, the well-choreographed, thematically powerful conclusion, coupled with...
This action-packed, breakneck-paced novel featuring a duo of lovestruck teenaged protagonists is a wildly imaginative young-adult apocalyptic thriller that also utilizes elements of science fiction, fantasy, folklore, mythology and romance.
Set in a near-future Chicago in the midst of a pandemic that has spread throughout the world, killing untold thousands of people with an unstoppable “super-cancer,” the story revolves around Olivya Wright-Ono, a 15-year-old girl with psychic abilities that allow her to see people’s auras. Olivya desperately wants to get to know a mysterious boy named Mikah that she met in V-class, the virtual school she attends. But all of her free time is spent helping her mother run a hospice that’s always full. Olivya and Mikah decide to meet in the middle of the night at the Lincoln Park Zoo, and, amid the bloody chaos of the apocalypse, the two find love; “[T]he place where their lips touched became the world, the galaxy, the universe.” After Mikah reveals that he isn’t exactly human, the two teens come to realize that only they can stop the looming destruction of humankind—and, ultimately, the entire universe. The diversity of narrative elements and historical references—invading aliens, dragons, angels, cyber-golems, the Great Chicago Fire, Mount Vesuvius, the minotaur, Lilith, demon hybrids, living star ships, etc.—while entertaining, at times overshadows the main storyline and negatively affects the novel’s fluidity. But the irreverent dialogue puts a lighthearted young-adult spin on the apocalyptic happenings; lines such as “[I]t seemed perfectly natural to have a god-dude just chillin’ in her room,” and “[T]hat psychotic gash of a smile wasn’t just out of character, it was absolute creepsville” inject wit and levity into the somber storyline. Ultimately, this is a novel about belief—believing in yourself, your friends, your family and the future—“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”
While the storyline is more than a little convoluted, the well-choreographed, thematically powerful conclusion, coupled with the deeply developed characters of Olivya and Mikah, make this a memorable read.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1600431029
Page Count: -
Publisher: Parker
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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
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