A well-written but mostly predictable Christian novel.
Lederman’s (co-editor: Good Words for the Young, 2016) decades-spanning Christian historical novel tells the story of a group of misfits who find their faith in Las Vegas.
Uukkarnit Noongwook is a Native American Athabaskan from Nenana, Alaska. In 1925, he sets out with his mother to find his father, a dog-sledder-turned-celebrity who absconded to the Lower 48 with a New York reporter. Their search brings them to Nevada, where a silver boom has drawn men from all over. Uukkarnit adopts the name “Luke” and encounters a group of kind Christians who teach him the ways of their faith. Meanwhile, David Gold is a boxer from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who attended the Moody Bible Institute before becoming the sparring partner of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. He’s seeking an answer to the questions, “Can I love God, not as I want Him to be, but as He is; and what is His will—what does He want of me?” By 1930, David is in Reno, Nevada, where he meets a woman whose small, Las Vegas–based congregation needs a preacher. In 2011, Tim Faber and Joan Reed are the middle-aged producers of the hit documentary series Mysteries of Modern Science. Tim never had any faith, but the once-devout Joan pines for her lost religiosity. They’re making a special about Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaître, who was the first to theorize that the universe had once been atom-sized and continues to expand—although, as this book portrays it, he was written out of history by jealous, secular scientists. Joan even suspects that an attempt was made on his life. Now, the producers travel to Las Vegas to meet with Lemaître’s 99-year-old astrophysicist colleague, Luke Noongwook, to get the full story. These separate stories of varied characters come together to form a tapestry of faith, yearning, and wonder at the majesty of the universe. Lederman’s prose is polished and often lyrical, particularly when he voices the characters of Luke and his mother: “Our gods are as harsh as the world around us, they offer no relief,” Luke’s mother says to David and her son. “Tatqim, moon god, lusts after his sister, Seqinek, the sun, and gives her endless chase; their story is an ugliness that mars the beauty of the night. And your god, where is he? Can he, too, be found among the stars?” Even in these moments, however, Lederman tips his hand to reveal the book’s strict Christian worldview, in which atheists are depicted as arrogant fools and other religions are portrayed as being rooted in fear. The book has the expected cameos of historical fiction—including the aforementioned Johnson and pilot Amelia Earhart—which fans of the genre will enjoy, even if they do strain credulity. The overall milieu is attractive throughout, and the novel is often entertaining. However, because it is, first and foremost, a story of rediscovering faith, the ultimate resolution of the main characters’ stories is never really in doubt.
A well-written but mostly predictable Christian novel.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9986030-1-8
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Azure Star, LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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