A thrown-together mishmash of fragmentary plot ideas, arbitrary events and discordant themes.
The discovery of a sunken World War II submarine plunges a rootless Labrador teen into a whirl of weird revelations and deadly danger.
Writing as if he were paid by the plotline, Bunn takes an actual news item about a similar find and spins around it a mare’s nest of premises and genre tropes. Having been shuttled for years among successive sets of exploitative foster parents and a group home, Wednesday skeptically fetches up in a run-down trailer with an out-of-work handyman and an airheaded beautician. Then, rambles in the nearby woods bring him encounters with Stump (aka Emily), a rough-hewn hermit’s home-schooled (but strangely well-socialized) daughter, and also the hidden hatch of a U-boat. Intercut flashbacks reveal that the German sub sank in the local river during a secret mission 70-plus years ago. The skeleton-filled sub contains both leads to a murderous spy ring still operating nearby and (shades of Dan Brown) an ancient weapon slated to join a cache of like mystical artifacts stolen by the Nazis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the author leaves much unexplained (how did that sub come to be buried in dry ground?), is unable to maintain either logical or tonal consistency, and brings the tale to a confused climax that combines kidnappings, gunfire and laxatives.
A thrown-together mishmash of fragmentary plot ideas, arbitrary events and discordant themes. (Thriller. 11-13)Pub Date: April 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-938463-53-2
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Bitingduck Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Much rousing sturm und drang, though what’s left after the dust settles is a heap of glittering but disparate good parts...
Scott tops off his deservedly popular series with a heaping shovelful of monster attacks, heroic last stands, earthquakes and other geological events, magic-working, millennia-long schemes coming to fruition, hearts laid bare, family revelations, transformations, redemptions and happy endings (for those deserving them).
Multiple plotlines—some of which, thanks to time travel, feature the same characters and even figures killed off in previous episodes—come to simultaneous heads in a whirl of short chapters. Flamel and allies (including Prometheus and Billy the Kid) defend modern San Francisco from a motley host of mythological baddies. Meanwhile, in ancient Danu Talis (aka Atlantis), Josh and Sophie are being swept into a play to bring certain Elders to power as the city’s downtrodden “humani” population rises up behind Virginia Dare, the repentant John Dee and other Immortals and Elders. The cast never seems unwieldy despite its size, the pacing never lets up, and the individual set pieces are fine mixtures of sudden action, heroic badinage and cliffhanger cutoffs. As a whole, though, the tale collapses under its own weight as the San Francisco subplots turn out to be no more than an irrelevant sideshow, and climactic conflicts take place on an island that is somehow both a historical, physical place and a higher reality from which Earth and other “shadowrealms” are spun off.
Much rousing sturm und drang, though what’s left after the dust settles is a heap of glittering but disparate good parts rather than a cohesive whole. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-73535-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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