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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Barry, M. 2013 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Newberg Public Library | FICTION BARRY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stayton Public Library | BARRY Max | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
At an exclusive school somewhere outside of Arlington, Virginia, students aren't taught history, geography, or mathematics--they are taught to persuade. Students learn to use language to manipulate minds, wielding words as weapons. The very best graduate as "poets," and enter a nameless organization of unknown purpose.
Whip-smart runaway Emily Ruff is making a living from three-card Monte on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization's recruiters. Drawn in to their strage world, which is populated by people named Bront#65533; and Eliot, she learns their key rule: That every person can be classified by personality type, his mind segmented and ultimately unlocked by the skilful application of words. For this reason, she must never allow another person to truly know her, lest she herself be coerced. Adapting quickly, Emily becomes the school's most talented prodigy, until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love.
Meanwhile, a seemingly innocent man named Wil Parke is brutally ambushed by two men in an airport bathroom. They claim he is the key to a secret war he knows nothing about, that he is an "outlier," immune to segmentation. Attempting to stay one step ahead of the organization and its mind-bending poets, Wil and his captors seek salvation in the toxically decimated town of Broken Hill, Australia, which, if ancient stories are true, sits above an ancient glyph of frightening power.
A brilliant thriller that traverses very modern questions of privacy, identity, and the rising obsession of data-collection, connecting them to centuries-old ideas about the power of language and coercion, Lexicon is Max Barry's most ambitious and spellbinding novel yet.
Author Notes
Max Barry is the author of Syrup (1999), Jennifer Government (2003), Company (2006), and Machine Man (2011). He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The fate of humanity is at stake in this ambitious satirical thriller from Australian author Barry (Machine Man). Picked off the streets of San Francisco after displaying a "natural aptitude" for persuasion, 16-year-old magician/hustler Emily Ruff joins a group of prodigies at "the Academy," where "poets" learn the magic of controlling others' minds with words. Meanwhile, hapless Wil Parke, the key player in an internal war between highly trained poets called Eliot and Woolf, is the only person known to survive the infamous "bareword" Woolf set loose in Broken Hill, Australia, two years before-an event that killed thousands and wiped Wil's memory clean. Eliot believes Wil to be the only one capable of stopping this word that "can persist... like an echo," and is determined to use Wil in his quest to elucidate the word's elemental code. Emily's story and Wil's story converge in a violent denouement that amuses as much as it shocks. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Modern-day sorcerers fight a war of words in this intensely analytical yet bombastic thriller. Barry (Machine Man, 2011, etc.) is usually trying to be the funny guy in the world of postmodern satire, with arrows keenly aimed at corporate greed and how to make it in advertising. Apparently, our Australian comrade has changed his mind, racing up alongside the likes of Neal Stephenson with this smart, compelling, action-packed thriller about the power of words. In a deft narrative move, Barry parallels two distinct storylines before bringing them together with jaw-dropping surprises. In the first, a carpenter named Wil is jumped in an airport bathroom by a pair of brutal agents who kill his girlfriend and kidnap him for reasons unknown. In a storyline a few years back, we meet a smart, homeless grifter named Emily Ruff on the streets of San Francisco. After a run-in with a mark, Emily is invited to train under the auspices of a mysterious international syndicate known as "The Poets." The shady peddlers of influence and power force Emily to study words as if they were a source of incredible power--and in the hands of gifted prodigies like Emily, they are. What could have been a sly attempt to satirize postmodern marketing and social media becomes something of a dark fantasy as couplets intended merely to influence become spell-like incantations with the power to kill. Back in America with Wil and his new captor, Elliot, we learn that Wil is the sole survivor of a terminal event in rural Australia and is being relentlessly pursued by Woolf, the perpetrator of the attack in Oz. In the background, the cult's mysterious leader, Yeats, pulls strings that put everyone at risk, and no one turns out to be who we imagined. An up-all-night thriller for freaks and geeks who want to see their wizards all grown up in the real world and armed to the teeth in a bloody story.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Words have power to persuade, to coerce, even to kill. And so they have since the days when wordsmiths were called sorcerers. Streetwise teenager Emily knows nothing of this until she is recruited to join a clandestine international organization that seems bent on taking over the world through the power of language the reason, perhaps, that its members call themselves poets. In the meantime, a young man, Wil, is kidnapped from an airport by two mysterious men determined to unlock a secret buried deep in his brain. Yes, Wil and Emily will be brought together in due course, but in the meantime there is a great deal, some of it abstruse, about language in this fast-paced, cerebral thriller that borders on speculative fiction, but none of it slows the nonstop action that takes readers from Washington, D.C., to a small town in the Australian desert, a town whose 3,300 residents have all died mysteriously and violently. Could the cause have been the power of words at work? The poets sometimes seem a bit too omnipotent, and the book's chronology is occasionally a bit confusing, but otherwise this is an absolutely first-rate, suspenseful thriller with convincing characters who invite readers' empathy and keep them turning pages until the satisfying conclusion.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Words have power, and in this pulse-pounding thriller special people called Poets have trained to be able to use words to control others. As the book opens, Wil Parke is kidnapped by two Poets who believe he is the only one who can stop a cataclysmic disaster. (LJ 5/1/13) (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.