Innovative sci-fi with plenty of substance, even if it’s weighed down by some confusing sequences.
In Greenleaf’s sci-fi actioner debut, a monk with special powers heads to outer space to save a colony from destruction.
Eamon, an Akuru monk, lives in a temple sealed off from the rest of the world by a security barrier. He is a gifted healer whose empathic abilities enable him to connect to other people’s minds and manipulate their memories. He’s the best at what he does, but being cloistered on a mountaintop his whole life has made him long to see other worlds. Excitement arrives in the form of agent Rachel Blue, an assassin who was presumed dead but showed up alive on a space station. Hostile and traumatized, Rachel needs Eamon’s help, but there’s some concern that attempts to heal her may cause damage to Eamon’s genetically modified nervous system. Additionally, attacks on outer space birthing centers have been decimating the number of empaths, and the temple’s future is now in doubt. Hoping to put a stop to the hostilities and to help Rachel, Eamon decides to heal her. The process has unintended consequences, however, and Eamon soon realizes that Rachel is now determined to destroy an enemy as well as an entire colony of innocent souls. Stripped of his healing duties and facing consequences for the botched healing, Eamon escapes the temple and heads to the Europa moon to prevent Rachel from carrying out her murderous objective. Greenleaf handily succeeds in creating a new universe. A few familiar things on Earth, such as mountaintop Sherpas, live in a world wholly different from our own, with futuristic takes on genetic engineering providing support for an action plot that rarely slows down. The novel has a wealth of terminology, acronyms, and abbreviations that can test the memory, and the narrative is at times somewhat confusing and hard to follow. Still, Greenleaf’s novel is ambitious and daring. The worlds on display are unique, and the journeys into other people’s minds are as interesting as any external occurrences. The overall humanness of Eamon, and even Rachel, is what eventually grounds the wild narrative’s chaos.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9848321-4-9
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Freeman Park Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2015
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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