A fast-moving tale of a spy who, much like the novel itself, is a little ragged around the edges.
A farm girl enters a world of danger in Horne’s (Breaking Mobius, 2013) military thriller.
Eighteen-year-old Rain Wilson has lived a modest life fixing fences and driving a tractor on her father Tolley’s Colorado ranch ever since her mother, Dahlia, left more than a decade ago. But things change dramatically when she learns that her dad is a former special agent/sniper and her mother is an active operative who may have gone rogue in Russia. The “weasel-faced” CIA chief of staff Christopher Dalton, who has bad history with Tolley, tries to recruit him to find Dahlia. When he declines, Rain volunteers instead. Although she excels during her training, Dalton places her in the Army instead of the CIA; stationed in Baghdad, she becomes “battle buddies” with Sgt. Prescott Willow. After Rain saves Dalton’s life by killing an insurgent, she and Prescott steal the chief’s cellphone, hoping its contents will lead them to Dahlia. Instead, it puts them on the run from the CIA, and along the way, Rain falls for the sensual Prescott. Tolley swoops in to find his daughter, aided by his old team: tech guru Shanty, ponytailed “muscle” Mogli, and former Navy SEAL Black. Plenty of action ensues, and Rain transforms into a “blonde bombshell” who fills out a sequined dress nicely, becomes well-versed in espionage and torture, and learns that she can trust no one. The plot is exaggerated, yet fun in a Scandal sort of way. But as the implausible storyline moves swiftly from the Middle East to Russia to the United States, the dialogue can be over the top, as when Tolley says, “He seems like a good kid, minus the ties to the most deadly man in the world,” or Black says, “That would be the end of American society as we know it.” Although Horne works to make the characters here more three-dimensional with their back stories, they still seem trite; Rain’s transformation from a girl wearing yesterday’s laundry into a woman who puts “effort into her hair or makeup” particularly smacks of cliché.
A fast-moving tale of a spy who, much like the novel itself, is a little ragged around the edges.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9911063-4-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yoshima Books
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2016
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
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