A lean, well-oiled narrative speeds this multilayered sci-fi story through occasionally obvious circuitry.
After accepting a Faustian bargain to be transformed into a full-body cyborg serving a nonhuman race, heroine Anomie realizes she’s part of a conspiracy deeper than she can imagine.
Miller’s tricky blend of cyberpunk, intrigue, action, racial politics and morality begins with heroine Anomie, a black woman in future San Francisco, lying mangled in a hospital room. A shady firm called Silk Road approaches her with a repugnant but evidently well-known offer: In exchange for a payout in millions of euros, she will allow her wrecked body to be replaced by a full, superstrong cybernetic prosthesis known as a “frend”—Finite Robotics Enhanced Neurosensory Development. Miller describes the long, grueling surgical process without gore but with just enough detail to get the reader’s (presumably organic) teeth grinding. Thus reborn, Anomie discovers she has leased herself to be a veritable plaything of the lumen, a noncorporeal race of software-based intelligence—think Skynet from the Terminator movies—inhabiting the bodies of various robots who have a yen for devising hideous ordeals. Apparently, if it weren’t for the physically toughened frends to amuse the powerful lumen, their whims would viciously turn on the entire human race. Anomie comes to realize that she has actually been carefully inserted into this nightmarish servitude and also in a mission to infiltrate the lumen and exploit their weaknesses. But how? And by whom? Canny readers may too easily decode the surface plot as Robert Ludlum stuff blended with Ray Kurzweil’s vision of Homo sapiens combining with machines. A big reveal at the end becomes painfully obvious midway through—Bourne Identity Theft, one might say. Nevertheless, Miller’s skillful economy of language and penchant for playing the cards close to the vest—or chest plate—works to his advantage as the tale picks up momentum/mayhem and puts an intriguing, nonstereotypical lead character through pitfalls and deadly perils of parahumanity. Ghost in the Shell fans will have a blast.
A lean, well-oiled narrative speeds this multilayered sci-fi story through occasionally obvious circuitry.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502761156
Page Count: 256
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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