Carlos Smith grows up between cultures as the U.S.-born son of a Black American-Chinese father and a Colombian mother with Palestinian roots. His childhood in Bolivia is shattered when his friend Manny is murdered, leaving Carlos furious at the injustice of a world in which the innocent suffer. After moving to Missouri, he discovers a preternatural talent for running, coming within “a quarter of a second” of the world record even with no training. Olympic glory, soccer stardom, and a multibillion-dollar personal brand (called “CarloS”) soon make him perhaps the planet’s best-known celebrity. Meanwhile, his mother, Francesca, directs the family’s fortune toward fundingAIEdu, a free global tutoring platform, and the Core Team, a group initially focused on supporting the Palestinian cause. Following her death, Carlos reluctantly takes up her work alongside Rosey, an economist; Azadi, a political scientist; Jack, a historian; and James, an IT expert. Their expansive mission is “to bring wisdom into government worldwide.” But as Carlos and his allies try to parlay his global fame into universal peace and prosperity, Palestinian hardliners and a secret society embedded in positions of power work to foster division and dissent. Adams deserves recognition for his story’s considerable ambition and willingness to engage with pressing political issues of the day, but Carlos’ meteoric rise to universally beloved athlete and world influencer is the first of numerous turns that approach inadvertent farce. Carlos comes off as a revered superhero but never feels like a believable person. Even when mourning Manny’s murder, he doesn’t elicit sympathy, and offers only static summations of the book’s ideological debates (“You either aren’t powerful or you aren’t good”). All the grand political ideas and melodramatic secret societies are described with similarly flat, overexplanatory prose. As the novel multiplies its subplots, readers may find themselves lost in its increasingly convoluted good intentions.
