An ambitious, compelling debut.
Rosencrans’ cerebral sci-fi debut depicts a young man’s dark, picaresque journey through the complicated strata of a future both engineered and savage.
Vladimir has a flawed template. “[T]here’s a statistical likelihood that you’ll commit a violent crime,” he’s told. An error in his genome marked him from birth as dangerous, condemning him to a life among the criminals, violent religious zealots and meddlesome “nanite” (nanorobotlike) creatures of Abaddon, a vast, feudal jungle territory where fiefs serve the distant, impenetrable Holy City. The territories exist on an unnamed island on a toxic Earth, repopulated by animals, plants and genetically modified humans—water people, snake people, people with pelts, etc.—and sheltered from the poisonous air by an invisible dome. Another “living wall”—a feat of nanobiotechnology—separates the Holy City from the sinners on the other side. There’s an ongoing war in Abaddon, since a branch of the ruling family of Patriarchs was unhappily expelled from the city. Despite being surrounded by thieves, murderers and alcoholics—not to mention experiencing occasional psychotic breaks that manifest as religious visions—Vladimir, in his mid-teens, is nearly a model citizen: a devout follower of the island’s faith (a hybrid derivative of Christianity), a good student and a disciplined sword fighter. He’s been noticed and nominated for “redemption.” An evasive nanite “herald” in the shape of a fly tells Vladimir that he will be taking the ethical examen and evaluated for entrance into the Holy City, a rare achievement. Then the war erupts. The fly, along with a woman whose skin looks like the midnight sky, a goat-headed boy and other heralds offer to guide him through the jungle and prepare him for the test. The heralds can’t be trusted but neither can the hallucinating mystic he meets nor his kensei, sword-master Sister Agnes. Truth feels just out of reach, and Vladimir is being used in some way, but every revelation feels tentative. Rosencrans’ tense, didactic narrative is beset with references to dogma, history and philosophy. The ideas are complex, and the author seems more sentimental about his arguments than his characters. Through Vladimir’s encounters with religion, politics and the immaterial world, Rosencrans addresses nature versus nurture, humanity’s goodness and its ability to evolve—thought-provoking questions, though at times, they’re rehashed too frequently. Nonetheless, Rosencrans’ reflections on how power is asserted and maintained and how Vladimir ultimately navigates these systems of control will keep readers interested.
An ambitious, compelling debut.Pub Date: May 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615649962
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Derby Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2013
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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