A book that’s likely to be best remembered for putting an attractive human face on an esoteric craft.
A committed dowser but reluctant psychic is the winsome protagonist of this sixth novel from Morrow (Ariel’s Crossing, 2002, etc.), which occupies a middle ground between domestic realism and Gothic suspense.
Don’t go to the movies, warned the ominously named Cassandra. But why would a 14-year-old daredevil listen to a kid sister half his age? So Christopher went, and died in a car crash. For Cass, this would be the first of her so-called forevisions, many associated with death, all of them profoundly discomfiting. Dowsing, or divining, is a different matter entirely. Her trustworthy father Nep divines for water; it’s a family tradition, though Cass is the first female with the gift. When we meet her as an adult, she’s a single parent with twin 11-year-old boys, living near her parents in rural upstate New York; she makes her living divining and teaching part-time. What triggers Morrow’s story is her discovery, while dowsing in the woods, of a teenage girl hanging from a tree. She’s vanished by the time the cops arrive, but they do find a disoriented live girl, Laura Bryant, a presumed runaway. Just as pressing as the mystery of the hanged girl is the news that Nep, her anchor, has early-stage Alzheimer’s. She’s not the only one now for whom reality is slippery. Cass lacks the religious faith of her mother, who thinks dowsing is pagan. Morrow does a fine job portraying a family whose love transcends sharply conflicting worldviews, a family sometimes battered by malicious gossip. He is less successful with the suspense strand, which involves too many flashbacks to Cass’s childhood. There’s a boogeyman pursuing her, but who, and what is his connection to Laura Bryant? Morrow’s timing is off. After a laborious buildup, there’s a pell-mell finale; Cass’s nemesis is a sketchily drawn childhood acquaintance. And, oh yes, he’s a serial killer.
A book that’s likely to be best remembered for putting an attractive human face on an esoteric craft.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-38263-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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