A sci-fi tale with a clear, commendable environmental message and a winsome, brainy superheroine.
In the first installment of debut author Osgood’s sci-fi series, a young woman in the near future, with the aid of an alien race, leads a charge to save a dying Earth while facing hostility from industrial corporations.
Corilan Troxler, like everyone else in 2040, needs protective clothing to withstand Earth’s toxic atmosphere. After having a vision of a world completely ravaged by environmental neglect, she hears a voice belonging to a being who eventually identifies himself as Earthos. He’s one of the Lumenians, an alien race that created humans and wants to save them before they go extinct. Earthos becomes Corilan’s “ancestral guide” and gives her some powers, including the ability to quickly heal. Then Corilan’s estranged father appears and tells her that he wants her to join the School of Ancestral Guidance alumni organization. As a member, she leads SAG’s Earth Renaissance Show tour around the United States, educating citizens about environmental issues via seminars. Before long, various companies in polluting industries start firing SAG-member employees and enlist a shady organization called Assurance Incorporated to take down Corilan and the Earth Renaissance Show. Meanwhile, Corilan offers anyone who pledges themselves as Earth’s guardians (or “allegiants”) a stay in a mysterious “Ephemeral Passage,” where they’ll be safe until the Earth is “rejuvenated” for repopulation. The story’s cautionary message is decidedly overt, but its arguments are relevant to the present day; for example, it features companies continuing to expand while employing “environmentally destructive inventions.” Similarly, it’s believable when these corporations influence the government to turn against the Earth Renaissance Show, particularly after its seminars start questioning government-approved standards. Corilan is a smart, able protagonist; although the highly advanced Earthos occasionally helps her, he typically encourages her to “figure out” problems on her own. Not much action happens in the story given the book’s length, but the pace maintains its momentum with the ever present menace of ASINC, led by CEO Thomas Hunter. There’s more that’s left to explore, particularly regarding the Lumenians and the Ephemeral Passage, and an explosive ending perfectly sets up the next installment.
A sci-fi tale with a clear, commendable environmental message and a winsome, brainy superheroine.Pub Date: March 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61114-328-7
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Mind Wings Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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.
