X-Files stuff, but with more gee whiz than shadowy brooding.
An adolescent finds an inquisitive alien one night and ends up on a hair-raising flying saucer ride.
Terrio’s (Dinosaurs, 1994, etc.) sci-fi novel is a middle-grade/YA adventure whose narrative covers less than 24 hours. Paul Roberts is a 12-year-old boy in suburban Virginia whose dad does some elite work for the military (this becomes of crucial importance later). One night after an evening of space-battle video gaming, Paul awakens to a genuine E.T. in the family home. Calming the panicked Paul, the diminutive, slender male—mostly humanoid, except for catlike eyes—reveals that his name is Kilaah and he is simply curious about Earth and its people and will be taking a brief look around. Paul—who dubs the being EIBE, for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Biological Entity—talks the extraordinary visitor into giving him a ride on the requisite UFO parked nearby. While EIBE/Kilaah asks naive questions about human customs and speech, Paul gets a top-secret peek at astounding things that governments have been covering up for ages: the lost continent of Atlantis—humanity’s true origin—in ruins beneath the ocean, its power-source crystal still dangerously functioning, and a rival race of unfriendly reptilian aliens in triangular crafts monitoring the planet but with ill intentions. The story delivers more than just expository dialogue; very quickly, Paul, EIBE, and the flying saucer (which carries no fancy weapons) are in danger from human and E.T. threats alike. Readers hip to real-life pseudoscience/conspiracy literature will realize that Terrio makes up very little in this fast-paced tale, drawing from a wellspring of existing UFO folklore and terminology (“Fast-walker”). He takes such louche topics as cattle mutilations, alien abductions, and the whacked-out dream visions of cult figure Edgar Cayce and weaves the threads of supermarket tabloids into a coherent whole (somewhat better than many of the genre’s “nonfiction” authors do). Results can either be taken as a breezy and surprisingly heartfelt first-contact escapade for tween and teen readers or (cue scary theremin music) a novel-as-propaganda tool meant to persuade youngsters not normally equipped for critical thinking into believing all those entity encounters that author Whitley Strieber goes on about. But it’s hard to get mad at a raffish narrative that can’t resist a shoutout to the Tim Burton spectacle Mars Attacks!
X-Files stuff, but with more gee whiz than shadowy brooding.Pub Date: June 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-983253-28-7
Page Count: 201
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2018
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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