by Thomas Pryce ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2014
A strong sci-fi double bill from a talented new writer.
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In two novellas, Pryce (Unnatural Selection, 2012) depicts a reluctant human soldier marooned during an interplanetary war and a recovering addict abducted by members of a bizarre alien species.
The first novella, War Torn, is combat-oriented sci-fi with a soft center. It describes a future conflict between earthlings and the Phraaks, a vaguely birdlike extraterrestrial race, which began as a minor trade dispute but has turned into the military-industrial-social linchpin of human society. Medic Nathan Bhat enlisted for revenge after his wife died in a Phraak attack. Now he regrets it, as he’s the one non–hard-ass in a squad of genetically enhanced soldiers conditioned to react with directed violence. The squad gets shot down on a mystery world, where they’re pursued by a Phraak warship full of troops. Bhat is the only human with enough of his wits about him to perceive that the planet itself responds lethally to any display of belligerence. The second novella, Bad Trip, features a recovering heroin addict, Sarah, who’s married to the man who saved her from suicide, New York City cop Ryan. After a suicide attempt, Sarah is mysteriously teleported to the ghastly feeding grounds of aliens in another solar system, where she witnesses them using assorted humanoid species as livestock. As Ryan tries to figure out clues to her whereabouts, Sarah fights the narcotic that keeps her and the other captives docile. It would have been fabulous if these two novellas were printed back-to-back in the tradition of the cherished Ace Double sci-fi paperbacks of yesteryear, for both yarns merit attention from that genre’s followers. (The collection also includes two other, minor pieces: a short story billed as a preview of a future property and a self-promoting gag done for a flash-fiction contest.) Pryce’s considerable talents of description, characterization, and pacing, previously showcased in Unnatural Selection, burnish this collection. Both of the novellas’ stories might have been obvious and leaden in lesser hands, but Pryce keeps the jolts and twists neatly on target in both. That said, a few of the author’s choices of pop-culture references and phrases (such as “tippy toes”) seem odd in such nightmarish circumstances.
A strong sci-fi double bill from a talented new writer.Pub Date: July 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9846691-2-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Cenozoic Publishing, Incorporated
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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