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| From Publishers Weekly British author Mercurio's American debut, a techno-thriller about a Russian pilot, offers plenty of action and suspense, but not enough characterization. We first meet Yefgenii Yeremin as an orphan in Stalingrad in 1946, the rest of his family having died in WWII. We never learn his age, only that he is big and strong and good at math. His math skills get him a scholarship to an aviation school, and from then on Yeremin dreams only of flying—first as one of the Russian MiG pilots who wore North Korean uniforms to attack American jets during the Korean War, then as an unsung hero of the Russian space program. Gripping action scenes include a gut-wrenching solo flight in which he's almost killed, but too many details of training pad out a short book, and nothing in it really tells us enough about Yeremin to make us care what happens to him. Mercurio (Bodies) trained as a doctor and served with the Royal Air Force. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From Booklist Orphaned by the Great Patriotic War, Yefgenii Yeremin is raised in an orphanage. He stoically studies mathematics, does hard labor in the ruins of devastated Stalingrad, and endures brutal assaults by the bullies in the orphanage. He wins a scholarship to an air institute, and when the Korean War breaks out, he becomes the ace of aces in his MIG-15--even though, officially, no Russians are serving in the war. He is posted to an air base in the Arctic as the cold war grinds on before being selected to become a cosmonaut. Mercurio's U.S. debut is haunting, powerful, and mysterious. His nearly skeletal prose spends no words to illuminate Yefgenii's stoic endurance of loss, privation, isolation, and pain, but the style works and has an austere, icy beauty. In scenes of aerial combat, Mercurio breaks from spareness to create vivid descriptions of tactics and the physical stresses of G-forces on the human body, and Yefgenii's ride into space, though equally vivid, is cluttered with the nomenclature of Russian rocketry and astronomy. All in all, a stunning debut from a writer who bears close attention. Thomas Gaughan Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Review "This is fighting fit, muscular prose, which carries no dead weight. In short, it's that rarest of things -- a highbrow book that's vertiginously thrilling."-"Observer" "Ascent is storytelling of a high caliber; fully imagined, finely crafted."-"Guardian" --This text refers to the Paperback edition. Review “This is fighting fit, muscular prose, which carries no dead weight. In short, it’s that rarest of things — a highbrow book that’s vertiginously thrilling.”–Observer “Ascent is storytelling of a high caliber; fully imagined, finely crafted.”–Guardian |
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