A sometimes-intriguing but awkwardly executed conspiracy thriller.
Ruff’s (Sh*tty Beijing Bike, 2016) archaeological thriller tells the story of an American writer who gets caught up in an international incident involving China’s famous Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor.
The story begins at Austin’s South by Southwest festival in an unspecified year when Texas secedes from the United States. There, Arthur Biers meets Wyatt Waller, a rich tech guru who has a plan to disrupt the archaeology world by using drones. Wyatt has just returned from Xi’an, China, where his assistant died under mysterious circumstances, and he’s looking for a replacement. That’s where Arthur, a Mandarin-speaking blogger, comes in; he has an interest in historical mysteries, and the unopened Tomb of the First Emperor in Xi’an—best known for the thousands of terra-cotta warriors who “guard” it—is one of the biggest. “All you really have to do is write about the people, and places you see,” explains Wyatt; he’ll be assisting the popular and controversial author Bruce Philips, who’s dead-set on discovering what’s inside the sealed tomb—and verifying Chinese claims that the tomb has never been opened before. Arthur will later be called a grave robber by Chinese newspapers, detained at the Austin airport, and forced to explain to an ambassador how he came to be inside the tomb. Ruff’s thriller does a fine job of mixing ancient mysteries with contemporary geopolitics, and it’s the latter element that gives this thriller a consistently sinister atmosphere. The author’s overall vision is poorly served by his writing, however, which doles out information in a confusing manner. The pacing is also criminally slow throughout, and even the occasional sharp-sounding lines can feel overwritten: “For his family, the Wallers, making money was a science, making a lot of money was an art, and making more money than you’ll ever know what to do with a civic duty.” In the end, the novel feels more like a slog than a lightweight caper.
A sometimes-intriguing but awkwardly executed conspiracy thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973416-17-3
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2019
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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