A well-written, fast-paced, and thoughtful adventure.
When a boy’s scientist mother is kidnapped, he tries to rescue her with the help of her greatest invention in this middle-grade novel.
Although Jason Pascal, 12, might be expected to know something about Recode Global, where his mother, Dr. Shannon Pascal, is a top scientist, the site is highly defended, demanding strict confidentiality agreements from its employees. So, along with everyone else on the Buttonwood Middle School field trip, Jason will be going through the secretive company’s doors for the first time. After Shannon’s presentation on how humans and artificial intelligence can be partners, she shows Jason her lab and Proto, the wristwatch-sized prototype AI she’s developing, whose “main governing principle is to work with humanity, not against it.” This is reassuring—because Proto hitches a ride out of the lab with Jason and becomes very useful indeed when it becomes evident that Shannon has been kidnapped. Proto helps Jason and his friend Maya Mateo to investigate, a search that leads them to a nefarious toy factory where a supervillain has big plans. With a little help from his friends, can Jason save his mother and the future of AI? Johnson (Code 7, 2017) offers a well-calculated balance of suspense and humor for middle school readers, and Jason and Maya make a good pair. They bond first over a mutual interest in bicycles and recording their tricks and then through their shared courage. Maya’s “DronePro” becomes something of a counterpart to Proto. Proto is often drolly amusing, as when he distracts barking dogs by beaming images of “tiny sweaters, booties, and blingy collars,” explaining that “my research indicates Chihuahuas have incredible fashion sense.” Action sequences are exciting and dramatic. The novel also provides food for thought in considering how AI could help or hurt humanity. Although the villains are over the top, they do give voice to some of the forces that might want to use AI for selfish, grandiose reasons.
A well-written, fast-paced, and thoughtful adventure.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-940556-07-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Candy Wrapper
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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