Strong cliché-free style, wondrous detail, and gifted moments show Farris chained by genre, a Bernini carving in soap. Great...
Third in Farris’s Fury series—The Fury and then (25 years later) The Fury and the Terror (2001)—again involving doppelgängers.
The Fury led us into the lives of the parted-before-birth psychic twins Gillian and Robin Bellaver and their encounters with MORG, a secret government organization investigating the uses of psychic terror. The Fury and the Power finds college grad and psychic Eden Waring hiding from MORG while Portland and Nashville get nuked. Eden, like Robin and Gillian, has a psychic twin, or doppelgänger, the talky, free-spirited Gwen, usually invisible but even more powerful than Eden. The evil Mordaunt, God’s satanic aspect, is himself split in two—to dim his destructive fury—and seeks to absorb Gwen and recover his full powers. Mordaunt announces his new drive for Ascendancy by having a golem bite out the neck of Pledger Lee Skeldon, the country’s leading evangelist, who is inhabited by a spirit that’s one of the Twelve, the disembodied Caretakers led by Pope John who are devoted to keeping Mordaunt in his weakened split state. The Twelve know that Eden Waring, who contains Gwen, is the Avatar, which Mordaunt knows as well. Mordaunt’s feminine half is what has been split off, explaining why he wants to take into himself the powers of Gwen, and so he tracks down Eden in Kenya, as she recovers from her appearance in the last Farris novel. Mordaunt comes as superillusionist Lincoln Grayle, who does tricks that demand real magic and runs a Vegas casino as bright as Spielberg’s spaceship in Close Encounters (King fans will recall the Evil in Vegas in The Stand). This ties in with the Assassin—lately of the FBI’s secret Impact Sector, who once killed the now resurrected Eden—who kidnaps Eden’s adoptive mother to lure Eden to him for a kill that really kills.
Strong cliché-free style, wondrous detail, and gifted moments show Farris chained by genre, a Bernini carving in soap. Great for the fans. Avenging Fury ahead.Pub Date: March 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-87728-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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