“Seems pretty cool!” according to a high school sophomore, surely the target market for these high jinks.
Dude! You won’t believe this! An interactive novel updates the world’s most awesome romance with new characters, plotlines, slang, puzzles, illustrations, and a cookie recipe.
The best way to explain how this “choose your own path” rendition of Shakespeare’s hoary old play works is to show you. This, for example, is section No. 155: “You look up to the balcony. A light is on inside! 'But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?' you whisper.…A naked old dude steps out from the light onto the balcony.…His naughty bits are dangling in the breeze....'AW GROSS, I THINK THAT’S HER DAD,' you say, moving away to investigate another balcony. 'NICE WEEN THOUGH.' " Then you choose one of these options: “Examine the nearby stone balcony: turn to 109” or “Examine some other balcony instead: turn to 167." If you choose 109, you’ll be seeing a wrinkled old lady in a nightgown—her mom. If you choose 167, you’ll find the superhot mega-babe you met at that party last night. Then you make another choice, and so it goes, flipping back and forth through the book, until you come to one of more than a hundred different endings, each featuring an illustration by a dream team of cartoonists. You can choose to be Romeo or Juliet—TEAM MONTAGUE or TEAM CAPULET—and depending on your choices, you may go to brunch with Benvolio at The Merchant of Breakfast, visit Ophelia in Denmark, or trade dumb sex puns with Mercutio…and you don’t necessarily have to die in the end! One of the options is to actually become Juliet’s glove—though sadly, “gloves are not capable of sentient thought.” North, who funded the first of these books (To Be or Not To Be, 2013) with a Kickstarter, has scattered the entire text of the play among the 474 numbered sections.
“Seems pretty cool!” according to a high school sophomore, surely the target market for these high jinks.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98330-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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