A chirpy doomsday tale starring a Bridget Jones–esque protagonist.
A California girl finds the hunky love of her life in a Barnes & Noble—and he turns out to be an ancient alien, the harbinger of Earth’s destruction.
In this debut novel, Autumn is a hip, slim Orange County girl with a habit of listening to late-night, conspiracy-talk radio. Inspired to visit a Barnes & Noble for a book on “light beings,” the alien visitors du jour, she suddenly senses invisible forces and hears voices in her head. It seems that the handsome-as-a-god stranger glimpsed at the bookstore is, in fact, a god—or the equivalent, a nearly ageless alien who, with the rest of his unimaginably advanced civilization, inspired legends of ancient Sumerian divinities and Noah’s flood (their doing, in fact). Rigel, Autumn’s newfound, hot extraterrestrial boyfriend, is an “Anunnaki,” one of a space-going race who guided the evolution of humans in primordial days (using them as slaves in gold mining) and whose home world, Nibiru, normally remains unseen in the solar system. But Nibiru’s orbit is about to brush with Earth’s. The cataclysmic alignment will kill all of humanity unless the heroine—gifted with a blue-colored soul, a fact that could shake the whole Galactic Federation to its foundation—makes the ultimate sacrifice. The busy plotline takes breathers not only for ecstatic trans-species sex (or attempts, the whole “light being” thing making intimacy a tricky proposition), but also retellings of Mesopotamian mythology with such figures as Innana, Enki, and Enil recast as squabbling space gods (and reappearing in Autumn’s apocalypse). Abell uses the flibbertigibbet voice of a chick-lit heroine for this comical take on UFO lore and Erich von Däniken’s pseudo-science in Chariots of the Gods?, complete with a world-shattering denouement of cosmic catastrophe. It kind of works—or at least goes down easier than had it been played for straight sci-fi/fantasy and paranormal romance, as most scribes in those genres’ stacks would have done. Abell name-checks such real-life, fringe-science authors as Zecharia Sitchin and Marshall Klarfeld and lists them as suggested reading in a short afterword (the e-book version provides links), though this yarn can be taken either as gonzo humor or a primer for cult-y New Age cosmology. That it bills itself as the first installment of the Anunnaki Chronicles suggests that the bleak ending is a cliffhanger.
A chirpy doomsday tale starring a Bridget Jones–esque protagonist.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-947119-02-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Alien Abduction Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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