Thrust: A Novel
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Booklist Review
It's 2079, and Laisvė is escaping a Raid. A penny tucked into her cheek, she escapes the flooded Brook by diving into the currents that slice between times. There, she enters other stories: of the designer of the Statue of Liberty and his cousin Aurora, who owns a pleasure house; of the diverse group of iron workers who put the Lady together; of a broken boy in the wrong time and the social worker determined to help him. By connecting them in a web of meaningful objects, carrier Laisvė hopes to save them in the ways that matter most. Thrust is kinky, queer, and razor sharp--Yuknavitch knots stirring stories of exploitation and hurt into a tapestry of human hubris and climate disaster, then sprinkles them with BDSM and female pleasure, absurd humor, and a whale named Bal, who swears she has never once swallowed a man. All this comes together to form a stunning novel about the future we might be able to create if we listen to voices we've previously ignored--a strange, emotional story about the rush of freedom, about welcoming in the world around us from earthworms to fungi, and about being willing to start again.
Publisher's Weekly Review
The blistering and visionary latest from Yuknavitch (The Book of Joan) follows a time-traveling girl on the run with her father in a bleak near future. Laisvė , an enchanted and motherless girl, keeps company with worms and whales as she flees with her single father from "Raids" perpetrated by ICE-like squads, "armed men in vans snaking like killer whales through the streets" of The Brook, a city suffused by water and comprising much of what appears to be Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. But Laisvė has a gift; she is a "carrier," able to move through time with the aid of a talking box turtle and reach fellow outsiders hailing from various points in history, arriving to help unroot them from the nightmares of their time. There is Mikael, the imprisoned "floating boy" of possibly criminal character in 1995; the early 21st century Mohawk laborer Joseph, filled with visions of his people; the 19th-century sculptor Frédéric, designer of the Statue of Liberty (the arduous construction of which becomes a recurring motif); and Aurora, who loses a leg during the Civil War and later becomes a sex worker. As Laisvė visits different periods of the region's history, there are taxonomies of beasts and bugs, and meditations on Amazonian fungi that give way to histories of vanished peoples and their imprint on the land they worked. "Stories are quantum," as Laisvė narrates, and Yuknavitch preserves the courage and eccentricity of her subjects by subverting any impulse toward rote orthodox storytelling. Instead, she offers a cracked mirror, an untethered dream, and a catch-all for myriad strands of history through which the reader may pleasurably roam free. This is the author's best yet. (June)
Kirkus Book Review
A girl living in a dystopian future travels through time via water. Young Laisvė has seen more in her life than most adults. By the time she's a preteen, she's watched her mother be killed as her family attempted to flee from Siberia by sea; later, on a boat trip to see the Statue of Liberty (now largely below water), someone snatches her infant brother. Left with just her father, Laisvė must endure what she calls "The Hiding," living furtively in a small apartment in a ruined New York City and dodging the people-snatching operations known as "the Raids." One evening, when a Raid team comes knocking, Laisvė must put a tightly planned escape plan into action. But rather than head to a safe house, as she and her father had agreed, Laisvė has a secret. She's seen her mother underwater, and she's received instructions to travel to the past through the water, seeking out specific people. For what purpose, Laisvė is not told, but she sets off on a journey that will take her from a disabled sex worker in Victorian-era New York to a teen boy in a detention center with ties to Timothy McVeigh, and from the laborers who built the Statue of Liberty to the daughter of a European war criminal. Yuknavitch, as ever, is a maximalist, but the book wisely uses Laisvė (whose name means freedom in Lithuanian) as a kind of conduit through which many other narratives flow. Ultimately, Yuknavitch is interested in the way the bodies of immigrants, refugees, and marginalized people have been the fodder used to keep the American project going--and her humane love for those same bodies shines out everywhere through the extravagant prose. Complex, ambitious, and unafraid to earnestly love--and critique--America and its most dearly held principles. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* It's 2079, and Laisve is escaping a Raid. A penny tucked into her cheek, she escapes the flooded Brook by diving into the currents that slice between times. There, she enters other stories: of the designer of the Statue of Liberty and his cousin Aurora, who owns a pleasure house; of the diverse group of iron workers who put the Lady together; of a broken boy in the wrong time and the social worker determined to help him. By connecting them in a web of meaningful objects, carrier Laisve hopes to save them in the ways that matter most. Thrust is kinky, queer, and razor sharp—Yuknavitch knots stirring stories of exploitation and hurt into a tapestry of human hubris and climate disaster, then sprinkles them with BDSM and female pleasure, absurd humor, and a whale named Bal, who swears she has never once swallowed a man. All this comes together to form a stunning novel about the future we might be able to create if we listen to voices we've previously ignored—a strange, emotional story about the rush of freedom, about welcoming in the world around us from earthworms to fungi, and about being willing to start again. Copyright 2022 Booklist Reviews.
Library Journal Reviews
International award winner Cercas expands to literary suspense inEven the Darkest Night, featuring a young ex-con who read Les Misérables in jail and after the murder of his sex-worker mother joins the Barcelona police and is sent to investigate a particularly brutal double murder outside the city. In another genre blender, the New York Times best-selling Crosley purveys humor, psychological twistiness, and strong writing to create what could be a Cult Classic featuring a woman who leaves a work dinner to buy cigarettes and encounters a string of ghostly ex-boyfriends (100,000-copy first printing). From Dermansky (e.g., the multi-best-booked The Red Car), Hurricane Girl sends 32-year-old Allison Brody from the West Coast to the East Coast, where she buys a small house on the beach and is promptly hit by a Category 3 hurricane that leaves her with a bleeding head and some very confused thoughts. Following Delicious Foods, which boast PEN/Faulkner and Hurston/Wright Legacy honors, Hannaham's Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta features a woman who transitioned in prison and is finally released after more than two decades, returning apprehensively to a New York she barely knows and a family that doesn't understand her (40,000-copy first printing). Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, Holleran returns after 13 years with The Kingdom of Sand, whose nameless narrator has survived the death of friends from AIDS and his parents from old age and tragedy and is surviving his own end time by enjoying classic films and near-anonymous sexual encounters (50,000-copy first printing). In Laskey's So Happy for You, following Center for Fiction First Novel finalist Under the Rainbow, Robin and Ellie have always been best friends, but queer academic Robin has her doubts about being maid of honor in Ellie's forthcoming wedding. In the medieval-set Lapnova, from ever-edgy, New York Times best-selling Moshfegh, hapless shepherd's son Marek—close only to a midwife feared for her ungodly way with nature—is caught up in the violence surrounding a cruel and corrupt lord. In this follow-up to Newman's multi-starred The Heavens, all The Men in the world mysteriously vanish at once, leaving women both to grieve and to rebuild. Prix Marguerite Yourcenar winner Nganang follows up hisLJ best-booked When the Plums Are Ripe with A Trail of Crab Tracks, whose protagonist slowly reveals his story—and the story of Cameroon's independence—on a prolonged stay with his son in the United States. The dedicated assistant principal at a New Jersey public high school thinks she has a lock on the principal's job when the current principal retires, but alas for the durable protagonist of Perrotta's Election, Tracy Flick [still] Can't Win (300,000-copy first printing). In Thrust, a motherless child from the late 21st century learns that she can connect with people over the last two centuries, from a French sculptor to a dictator's daughter; from Yuknavitch, a Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize finalist.
Copyright 2021 Library Journal.Publishers Weekly Reviews
The blistering and visionary latest from Yuknavitch (The Book of Joan) follows a time-traveling girl on the run with her father in a bleak near future. Laisve , an enchanted and motherless girl, keeps company with worms and whales as she flees with her single father from "Raids" perpetrated by ICE-like squads, "armed men in vans snaking like killer whales through the streets" of The Brook, a city suffused by water and comprising much of what appears to be Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. But Laisve has a gift; she is a "carrier," able to move through time with the aid of a talking box turtle and reach fellow outsiders hailing from various points in history, arriving to help unroot them from the nightmares of their time. There is Mikael, the imprisoned "floating boy" of possibly criminal character in 1995; the early 21st century Mohawk laborer Joseph, filled with visions of his people; the 19th-century sculptor Frédéric, designer of the Statue of Liberty (the arduous construction of which becomes a recurring motif); and Aurora, who loses a leg during the Civil War and later becomes a sex worker. As Laisve visits different periods of the region's history, there are taxonomies of beasts and bugs, and meditations on Amazonian fungi that give way to histories of vanished peoples and their imprint on the land they worked. "Stories are quantum," as Laisve narrates, and Yuknavitch preserves the courage and eccentricity of her subjects by subverting any impulse toward rote orthodox storytelling. Instead, she offers a cracked mirror, an untethered dream, and a catch-all for myriad strands of history through which the reader may pleasurably roam free. This is the author's best yet. (June)
Copyright 2022 Publishers Weekly.Reviews from GoodReads
Citations
Yuknavitch, L. (2022). Thrust: A Novel . Penguin Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)Yuknavitch, Lidia. 2022. Thrust: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities (Notes and Bibliography) Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)Yuknavitch, Lidia. Thrust: A Novel Penguin Publishing Group, 2022.
Harvard Citation (style guide)Yuknavitch, L. (2022). Thrust: a novel. Penguin Publishing Group.
MLA Citation, 9th Edition (style guide)Yuknavitch, Lidia. Thrust: A Novel Penguin Publishing Group, 2022.
Copy Details
Collection | Owned | Available | Number of Holds |
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Libby | 1 | 0 | 0 |