A captivating, exciting, and thoughtful time-manipulation story.
In this YA sci-fi thriller, a teenager discovers that he has the ability to slow time—and that another “slower” like him has committed nefarious crimes.
Fourteen-year-old Emit Friend, of a Princeton, New Jersey, suburb, has a few problems: ADHD, a sleeping disorder that makes him drowsy during the day, trouble concentrating, and frequent, bad headaches. During an especially boring science class, he daydreams about playing a prank on his teacher by hiding her textbook. When she accuses Emit of stealing it, he doesn’t understand—he was only daydreaming. Emit’s principal is sympathetic, and after the teacher finds her textbook where Emit imagined hiding it, he advises the young man to think about how it happened. So Emit pays attention while he “zone[s] out”—and discovers that he can move at normal speed while everything else is slowed down, almost frozen. Emit is delighted at being a “slower,” using his superpower to get the better of bullies, trick friends, and even change the course of a professional football game. But he soon discovers the ability’s dark side: “it’s fun to use power. And it’s much easier to use power to do bad than to do good.” It turns out that someone close to him is an even more powerful slower who’s done terrible things—and that person wants to join forces with Emit. To prevent a catastrophe, Emit must stop the other slower before it’s too late. In his debut novel, Shepherd beautifully orchestrates the manner in which Emit’s story unfolds. The teenage protagonist has a mischievous personality, so it makes sense that he initially slows time for mild pranks on friends and enemies. The escalation from unwitting to deliberate harm feels natural—and all the more chilling for being so. Emit’s musings on right, wrong, and whether one’s actions are forgivable make for scenes that are just as compelling as the book’s taut, action-packed climax. His voice is natural and engaging, carrying readers along in this page-turner, and side characters play vivid roles as well. A satisfying ending offers a surprise or two and may leave readers hoping for a sequel.
A captivating, exciting, and thoughtful time-manipulation story.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-578-42481-1
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2019
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
