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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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