The first gripping installment in a sci-fi series set in a future of fractious and dangerous alien apartheid.
A member of a visiting alien race becomes the subject of an orchestrated hunt on Earth.
In this sci-fi debut by an author team writing under a pseudonym, Earth in the near future has become a dystopian war zone since the event known as Hatred Day, when a portal opened in the atmosphere from the distant planet Armador. Through the portal had come members of an alien superrace called the Inborn, capable of great feats of physical strength and energy manipulation indistinguishable from sorcery. But the portal itself warps Earth’s biosphere, spoiling and mutating it, and the arrival of the Inborn sparks a 22-year conflict called The Inborn War and a worldwide hatred of these aliens, given vent every year on the anniversary of Hatred Day. The plot centers on an Inborn named Snofrid Yagami, whose friends seek to save her from the slave auction block of a filthy human-run ghetto in the city of Hollowstone. They succeed, despite some serious competitive bidding, only to realize that she’s experiencing a selective form of amnesia—she can’t recall specifics of her recent past or the identity of her friends. She scrambles to cope with the fallout of relationships she can no longer remember, with men like the munitions dealer Atlas Bancroft and the deadly state-sponsored killer Lucian Lozoraitis (“With hard angled brows, light stubble, and full chapped lips, he was an untidy sort of attractive; but his badger-grey eyes harbored a calculating flare”). The authorial device of giving Snofrid such a convenient case of amnesia wears thin and is never convincing as anything more than a means of making exposition possible. But this is a minor quibble in the face of the book’s smart and dazzling worldbuilding. The magic of the Inborn is intricately conceived, and the long-term ramifications of their arrival on Earth are worked out in thoroughly believable detail. The pleasingly complex plot moves its large cast of memorable characters through a carefully controlled escalation of dangers, with Snofrid and her comrades at the heart. This confident and captivating novel should leave readers eagerly anticipating future volumes.
The first gripping installment in a sci-fi series set in a future of fractious and dangerous alien apartheid.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972029-1-5
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Chrysanthalix Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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