An immersive and satisfying science fiction thriller.
A woman wakes up in a body not her own in this novel from Moskovitz (A Stand-in for Dying, 2019), the second in his Brink of Life trilogy.
January 2059. After somehow losing consciousness, a woman comes to at a funeral—the funeral of her husband, Arlo Kresky. The only problem? She’s never seen the man said to be her husband. Indeed, when she gets in front of a mirror, she’s never before seen the person looking back at her, either: “It was a pretty face. Some might say exquisite. Her hair was jet black and straight, falling almost to her shoulders….Even after this close inspection, there wasn’t a trace of familiarity. The face in the mirror remained a stranger.” She is apparently the widow Petra Kresky, but she does not associate this beautiful, bruise-covered woman with herself. Is she suffering from amnesia? No, because she does have a sense of her former self and of a woman named Macklyn. She learns from her household android that Petra, despite being 42, is kept at the biological age of 20 by some mysterious technology. She also discovers that the dead Arlo was obsessed with immortality and that Petra has been carrying on an affair with Arlo’s hired biographer, Connor. As she digs into the truth of her identity, she uncovers a truly remarkable web of secrets: a clandestine program to keep the rich young forever, a government spy organization, and an anti-immortality hacker group bent on bringing it all down. Moskovitz tells the story with urgent concision, his prose brisk and clear: “She disembarked and melted quickly into a rush hour crowd, hurrying home or to their chosen entertainment of the evening. The sides of skyscrapers were lit with images from the day’s events. She stopped short in front of one such display that featured an image of Connor rising eight stories high.” This makes the story a quicker and more satisfying read than even the previous volume in the series (which is related to this one but not necessary to have read to understand it). With his thoughtful exploration of the ethical consequences of technology and class division, Moskovitz offers another sci-fi morality tale in the tradition of Philip K. Dick and Black Mirror.
An immersive and satisfying science fiction thriller.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73417-891-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Fluke Tale Productions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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