A crowded but exciting and fun story of heroes and villains.
When a teenage New Yorker gains amazing powers, he must decide whether to use his newfound abilities for good or for personal gain.
In 1997, Queens native Rohan Chang has a lot on his plate, between family pressure to succeed academically and work at his brother’s pharmacy, racism at school and on the street, and trying to fit in among his fellow students. If that wasn’t enough, one day he finds that he has magical superpowers that include superspeed and teleportation. However, they also come with voices in his head that have different personalities. The loudest of these calls himself Nick the Brute and wants to tempt Rohan into violence and to use his powers for self-enrichment: “When you achieve control, total control, you’ll be invincible.” This is a lot for anyone to handle, of course; all Rohan aspired to do was to impress Amayah, a devout Christian girl on whom he has a crush. To make matters worse, there’s a serial killer on the loose in New York City, and Rohan may be the only one who can stop them; this becomes even more challenging when the murderer learns his identity and seek to destroy him. As Rohan discovers new powers, he struggles to learn how to use them properly. Also, the teen must learn to trust his friends and loved ones in the face of unimaginable dangers. Over the course of this book, Lee delivers an incredibly creative superhero fantasy tale that brings together elements of various cultures, as well as aspects of history and Christianity, into an exciting adventure. The vast, ever increasing number of superpowers feels somewhat excessive at times, but Lee does well to balance this out by showing how the protagonist gradually learns how to use them effectively. Similarly, the large cast of characters makes it challenging to fully appreciate the complexities of each one individually, but the central figures—particularly Rohan and Amayah—carry the story and give it heart. Overall, it’s an entertaining narrative that’s sure to delight genre fans.
A crowded but exciting and fun story of heroes and villains.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2022
ISBN: 9781945316029
Page Count: 542
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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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