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Chaos Theory

by Colin Robertson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 16, 2015

Readers will likely be sorry to see this book (and the world) come to a conclusion.

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It’s the end of the world as we know it in this fine Dr. Strangelove–ian satire about the mad search for a doomsday device.

Robertson’s (The Siege of Walter Parks, 2012) self-billed “feel good story about the end of the world” may not be completely unique, but it is exceedingly clever and entertaining and, at times, spot-on loony. Thirteen-year-old Alex Graham and his friend Gerald find a thermos-shaped canister labeled “Top Secret” and “Property of the United States Government.” No sooner does Alex put it up for bid on eBay than he finds himself hunted by mercenaries and the CIA. The elusive canister turns out to be a long-lost weapon of ultimate destruction created by a Dr. MacGuffin (likely a sly reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s signature plot device of a desired object that drives a story). The United States, led by an ineffectual president who fancies himself a poet, wants it back, but others, including a stereotypically drawn Islamic terrorist and a German arms dealer, have their own designs on the elusive weapon. CIA agent Charlie Draper, whose own world ended with the deaths of his wife and daughter, takes Alex under his wing as the search becomes more frantic and the body count escalates. Robertson is adept at balancing the story’s farcical and gritty elements. The book’s violence is sudden and punishing, which underscores the high stakes and invests the story with a gravitas that makes its absurdist passages even funnier. That said, the humor is hit-or-miss; all the jokes can’t be good, as Groucho Marx once said, but readers, after wading through an opening disclaimer, a preface, a few words about the book’s science (“There isn’t any”), and a faux introduction that extols the book’s silliness, might be tempted to ask the author to get on with it. The invented quotes (“‘Do I really sound like that?’—R.M. Nixon”) that head most chapters also become increasingly tiresome. That said, there are also some sublimely silly passages whose deadpan musings recall the late Douglas Adams.

Readers will likely be sorry to see this book (and the world) come to a conclusion.

Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Gin & Tonic Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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NEVER LET ME GO

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2005

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

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An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).

Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

Pub Date: April 11, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SUMMER WE CROSSED EUROPE IN THE RAIN
by Kazuo Ishiguro ; illustrated by Bianca Bagnarelli

- BOOK REVIEW
KLARA AND THE SUN
by Kazuo Ishiguro

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BURIED GIANT
by Kazuo Ishiguro

- BOOK TO SCREEN
‘Never Let Me Go’ Series in the Works at FX

- AWARDS
Shortlists for TikTok Book Awards Are Revealed

- PERSPECTIVES
Best Books of the Century (So Far): Fiction

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LABYRINTH

by Catherine Coulter ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 30, 2019

Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.

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Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.

Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.

Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.