A tech-driven thriller; entertaining despite the inflated prose.
Author Holt’s (Substrate, 2016, etc.) innovative thriller drives home the fact that technology isn’t always our friend.
This is Holt’s second novel featuring Lincoln “Mac” MacMahan, a professor and veteran suffering from PTSD. In Oblique (2016), Mac and his students uncovered a government plot to influence the upcoming presidential election (where do authors get such outlandish ideas?). This time around, Mac; his wife, Mindy; and his students discover a foreign scheme to replace the newly elected Margie Perserve, the first female U.S. president, who seeks to unify the country after her divisive predecessor’s nefarious plan failed. But the autocratic, lascivious ruler of an Asian country has Perserve kidnapped, replacing her with an undetectable solid hologram that enables him to direct American policy. As Holt explains in his preface, these are “Hologram forms with self-sustaining space occupancy, light energy, behavior, touch, and mass. A human facsimile, a replica out of thin air, vectored by the nation’s artificial intelligence (AI) backend.” The president’s husband, Roy, a former solider like Mac, notices changes in his wife’s behavior. Around that same time, Mac and Mindy discover inexplicable shifts in the president’s policies. They bring in computer whiz Justin, one of Mac’s students, who uses a filter and finds something suspicious in recent images of Perserve. It’s a race to uncover the imposter and free the president from her overseas captors. Holt’s novel is a satisfying blend of sci-fi, suspense, and romance. He paces his narrative well. The reader is shuttled from Asia to Washington, D.C., to New York as the tension builds. Holt, who comes from a technological background, makes the holographic process believable, no small feat. The novel, however, assumes a tiresomely earnest tone. The leader and his minions are evil, while all the Americans are morally correct. This is especially evident when it comes to the two couples, Mac and Mindy and Margie and Roy: “I do know that what kept me going through all my recovery were dreams of you and your embrace. Imagining that you loved me,” Mindy says. Still, action wins the day here and largely distracts from the flaws.
A tech-driven thriller; entertaining despite the inflated prose.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-15823-4
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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