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
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
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
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