A country-hopping political novel that never finds its feet.
Political violence in the Philippines touches the life of a man in Canada in Araneta’s debut novel.
In Winnipeg, Manitoba, 56-year-old Filipino immigrant Dario Quitario, wracked with cancer and forgetful due to painkillers, is waiting to die. As his doctor prepares him for his assisted suicide, Dario’s mind drifts to his daughter, Angela. Not long before, in the Philippines, Angela was engaged to Ramon Reyes, a Harvard-educated lawyer and candidate for the office of vice mayor of Santo Cristo. Unfortunately, the sitting vice mayor, Paquito Gonzales—who wished to ascend to mayor and leave his previous office to his son—wasn’t about to let it go without a fight. “I’ve heard talk that Paquito protects drug lords,” Dario warned Ramon when the couple came to Canada for a visit. “He’s probably one of them. I don’t want to know where you stand on this problem of illegal drugs, for a very simple reason. If you condone it, you’ll be dying a slow death. If you fight it, you’ll be a dead man walking.” Dario, whose time in the Filipino military caused him to witness—and commit—acts of extrajudicial violence, knows of what he speaks. Ramon doesn’t heed Dario’s advice, however, and continues his grassroots campaign. Can an ailing Dario save his daughter and her fiance from the violence he once escaped? Araneta’s muscular prose captures the terseness of Dario’s world: “After a few seconds, Dario added, ‘we do what we need to do to stay alive.’ That was the closest that Ronnie would hear Dario mention any philosophy in life.” The book isn’t a traditional thriller—a good portion of it, set in Canada, chronicles Dario’s illness and his marriage to his much-younger wife, Barb. These more literary sections aren’t very compelling, however, nor are the Philippines sections all that thrilling. The characters have a lot of backstory, but the leisurely pace makes the book feel overlong, as a whole. Although many of the themes that Araneta raises are ambitious—corruption, the right to die—Dario, as a character, lacks the requisite complexity to bring them fully to life.
A country-hopping political novel that never finds its feet.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 312
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
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