Another well-written but depressing dystopian thriller by Laidlaw (Kalifornia, 1992; Dad's Nuke, 1985). Laidlaw always enjoys drawing truly screwed up families, with neighborhood wars in Dad's Nuke and a new baby that turns out to be a living processor of nuclear waste, and a family in Kalifornia so crazily cooked up that its deformities can't be encapsuled in a sentence. This time, we have the orphaned brothers, Sal Diaz, an open gay who teaches karate and tai chi and drives around in a black van looking for young boys to seduce, and Lupe Diaz, who bears a bright switchblade and looks girlishly smoothfaced because he has no testicles (he dreams that they were burned off with a blowtorch), though he does have an imaginary gang he carries around in his head. Let's add—in clearing up the title—that the Greek root for ``testicle'' means orchid (as in orchidectomy). And then there's the ex-con biker Hawk, a Bible-beater who more or less invents his own Jesus for his band of youthful converts—Hank's girlfriend calls him Peter Pan. Lupe has been released from the hospital and comes looking for Sal in Shangri-La, a part of Bohemia Bay where Hawk's gang gathers somewhere outside of Los Angeles. Then there's high-school art student Mike James, who draws dragons and has fallen in with a low-brow gang from the Alternative School. As it happens, Lupe is an artist as well as a rather femininely attractive serial killer, though his sketches are of his victims whose life-power he has eaten—that mute gang crawling around in his head ``like baby rats.'' Everybody belongs to some gang, and Hawk's and Sal's gangs fall out, and make peace—but then Sal's found dead with Hawk's crucifix up his rectum.... The urge for gang buddyhood among boys is woven with the obsessions of a serial killer their age bent on eating...orchids. Not heartwarming.
Pub Date: March 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10515-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
