A heroic cosmic odyssey that—for all the technology—remains textured with the stuff of legend, stirring and ultimately...
A space explorer—investigating a vanished expedition to colonize a faraway world—recalls an epic life filled with adventures, loss, and peril as he faces a potential reunion with a former love.
Debut author Cahill spins a wide-roaming galactic tale with mythic overtones here. The novel’s first-person narrator is big, stout-hearted Oren Siris of a moon mining colony called Verygone. In spacegoing humanity’s far future (or remote past?), Oren belongs to the “Fellowship,” a vast unity of settled worlds—there’s no mention of intelligent alien life—ever pushing outward and exploring, much like the Star Trek franchise’s Federation. In trying to establish an outpost on the promising but remote world of Eaiph, a vanguard of “Architects” has seemingly disappeared—among them is Saiara Tumon Yta, a Fellowship ensign who was Oren’s great love. Because people can live millennia with advanced Fellowship technology and cryonic stasis, Oren hopes to reunite with Saiara, even after 627 years, as his own follow-up ship nears the planet. Meanwhile, the narrative recounts Oren’s earlier space exploits as a rookie cadet facing dangers and wonders, ranging from a derelict starship’s artificial intelligence (aka the “shipheart”) turning malignant to a rococo culture featuring a charming, penniless aristocrat leading visitors through a sort of carnival masquerade drawn from the dominant religion. At last on the semibarbaric Eaiph, Oren encounters old and new threats while trying to remain true to the Fellowship’s idealistic goals and his own dreams. The author’s rich vocabulary weaves spells with hard sci-fi threads blended neatly with loanwords and arcane and antique jargon (“amanuensis,” “pausha,” “biologician”). It is a mixture that sometimes touches the sublime in sci-fi lyricism: “We had reached Eaiph, one of the most fertile worlds ever discovered, a glassy blue cauldron of life, waiting for those to live it. In three more galactic weeks, the little waterstone would arrive to meet us on its passage around Soth Ra.” One can forgive Cahill’s springing the old Nightmare on Elm Street trick a few times too many, as tough spots and cliffhangers turn out to be dreams (yet sometimes, more than dreams). The manner in which the author resolves the strands should pinch the heartstrings of readers accustomed to programmed uplift.
A heroic cosmic odyssey that—for all the technology—remains textured with the stuff of legend, stirring and ultimately melancholy.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973326-65-6
Page Count: 490
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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