An inventive puzzle of a novel by a writer of singular vision.
A teenager forges an impossible connection with a long-dead Swiss mathematician in Seurat’s debut novel.
Fifteen-year-old Ulrick Kennedy has been having nightmares. He’s a member of the paper airplane team at the elite Percival Lowell High School in New York, and he’s terrified that he’ll mess up in some way to prevent his team from making it to nationals. His father, Wall Street executive Harry Kennedy, is not pleased by his son’s slipping grades—nor by the fact that the boy cares so much about paper airplanes that he’s having stress nightmares. He’d much rather see Ulrick focus on his math studies and learn some skills that may one day serve him on the trading floor. When Ulrick and the rest of the paper airplane team lose a bet concerning the law of fluid dynamics to their eccentric math teacher, Professor Ross, they find themselves forced to take a makeup exam—one that Ulrick is willing to go to any length to pass, including buying and consuming a strange study aid called Altus Aerius Oculus (“High Altitude Eye”) from an apothecary in Chinatown. “The mixture is very selective in that it does not have the slightest effect on memory, but dramatically increases one’s analytical powers,” the woman at the shop tells him. “The active ingredient is a solution from an optic nerve of a Swiss mathematician, I forget his name.” At the same time, incautious traders at Harry’s firm find themselves targeted by the SEC over some blind bid trades that could potentially bring the whole business crashing down. Finally, back in 18th century Berlin, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler is desperate to solve the Great Theorem of Fermat at the behest of Frederick the Great. As time and space begin to converge, Ulrick finds he’s doing much more than studying the laws of physics—he’s accidentally defying them.
Seurat’s prose has a technical precision that complements the many physicists and mathematicians who populate the novel’s pages. He’s particularly adept at evoking the richness of Euler’s Berlin, a place and time in which astrology, science, and the caprices of philosopher kings exert their influences side by side. The author clearly enjoys exploring physical laws, logical paradoxes, and other reality puzzles—at times, the book can feel less like a novel and more like a giant word problem. There are three main narrative threads, all of which take a long time to get going and an even longer time to reveal how they are connected to one another. Fans of this type of cerebral storytelling will enjoy the book’s payoff, so long as they manage to stick with it over its nearly 400 pages. Along the way, they can look forward to unexpected plot twists, impressive evocations of setting and character, and a wry sense of humor—here, Frederick the Great practices the flute: “A shrill, squeaky sound cut through the State Room. It was a complete surprise; even the walls of silver and pink pattern refused to resonate the ugly shriek. His Majesty tried again; he lifted the flute slowly to his mouth, and with distrust blew into the mouthpiece.”
An inventive puzzle of a novel by a writer of singular vision.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2015
ISBN: 9780991323548
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Quadrature Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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