Smart and humorous sci-fi about a mysterious sphere—a real ball.
An incredible, science-defying black sphere found in a California watermelon field sparks official paranoia, bizarre experiments, and an unlikely love match between a linguist-prodigy and an IT researcher.
In an arch tone and rich, dense, Nabokov-ian language, author Lakritz presents a meandering “report” on a mysterious Fortean find in a California watermelon patch in the extrapolated future Earth of 2024 and the absurdist reactions it provokes. “The Watermelon,” aka the Sphere, is soccer ball–sized, perfectly black (except when it isn’t) and nonreflective (except when it isn’t). Unknown in origin and intent, incapable of being precisely measured, analyzed or penetrated, and occasionally self-multiplying, teleporting and changing in appearance, seemingly just to frustrate observers, it quietly defies fundamental tenets of physics and reality. As two similar baffling artifacts—one rod-shaped, the other crystallike—turn up in unlikely environments in France and Russia, the Watermelon is judged to be a possible national security issue and locked in a secret underground complex in Virginia. There, a nervous U.S. government shanghais numerous eccentrics and experts—a chess grandmaster, a legendary physicist, professional magicians—to try and solve the enigma. The nameless narrator is one such misfit maven, a computer scientist who falls in love with a fellow investigator, a celebrated but emotionally fragile linguistic prodigy. The storyline is low on incident but bursting with erudition and commentaries about Alan Turing, artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics, encryption mathematics, relationships, Buddhism, the fine line between genius and madness—and a NOVA season’s worth of other deep-thought topics. It’s all relayed in language that straddles science and poetry: “It’s a really elegant design, a web of intricate feedback, of loops on loops on loops. And the control signals that run the loops are the cytokines—Interleukins, Tumor Necrosis, Bradykinin, etc.—a suite of small molecules.” Lakritz even writes a clever Watermelon-ish justification as to why the memoirist’s capacious mind is suddenly so full of esoterica and wonderment, although readers will judge for themselves how much that mitigates the novel’s ambiguous ending.
Smart and humorous sci-fi about a mysterious sphere—a real ball.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484839546
Page Count: 496
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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