Michael Crichton meets the Brothers Grimm in a battle to decide humankind's evolutionary fate. Dalton Stewart, ruthless billionaire owner of Biotech, Inc., joins forces with Dr. Harold Goth, an equally ruthless, albeit less well-off Nobel laureate. Their goal is to develop Goth's genetic- code enhancing process, which improves intelligence, health, and the keenness of the five senses. Their program, called Jupiter, will enable parents to have children who are perfect in every way- -if superprecocious, hyperkinetic, psychic bundles of joy are your idea of perfect. Upon completion, Jupiter will be marketed to the wealthy at $500,000 a pop. Like any high-rolling enterprise, it requires a working prototype in order to lure the customers into the showroom; so Stewart, being the old softie that he is, impregnates his unwitting wife, Anne, with a Jupiter-enhanced zygote. Naturally, Stewart's rivals are somewhat resentful of his deal with Goth and would do anything to disrupt their plan. One adversary, Baroness Gerta Von Hauser (a cross between Eva Braun and Cruella DeVil), will stop at nothing to get hold of Jupiter so she can start her own öber-baby factory. To obtain the program and its password, currently in the possession of Anne (now estranged from Dalton) Von Hauser arranges to have the Jupiter child—a towheaded delight named Genny who at three reads the New York Times and plays piano by ear—brought to her creepy castle in Bavaria as a hostage. Anne gives chase but is no match for the baroness, who locks her up in a torture chamber until she's ready to give up the goods. But Genny doesn't play by those rules. She escapes from her tower, torches the castle, slays the evil baroness with a sword, and rescues Mom. They all live happily ever after. No fooling. A shambling yet enjoyable bit of claptrap from the author of Prussian Blue (1991).
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-84116-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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