A leisurely opening is mere preparation for the fierce struggle to follow—and it’s more than worth the wait.
A college student’s visions may be effective in a battle against demons in Baldwin’s (Fathers House, 2013) supernatural thriller.
Nineteen-year-old Kallie Hunt has been waking up most mornings with a strange sense of déjà vu. These feelings are so disturbing that she seeks help from the Rev. Johnny Swag. Swag, who belongs to the Alliance of Initiates, a secret subset of the United Religions Organizations, suspects that Kallie is a Rememberer—someone with an ability to see “past life cycles.” The A.I. uses a Rememberer to thwart terrorist attacks before they happen, but one has gone rogue, taunting the A.I. by mutilating the bodies of terrorists that a Rememberer has already killed and leaving behind cryptic messages. The Rogue, however, may be planning something that’s far worse than a potential terrorist strike. The first half of the novel feels muted, consisting mostly of lengthy exposition. But these scenes ultimately prove crucial to the plot, as many delve into weighty concepts such as time-cycles and eternal return—essentially that time is circular and a Rememberer is literally remembering, not necessarily seeing the future. While the first part is restrained, readers will welcome the unleashed latter half, even if it seems to come from nowhere. Characters, for instance, face off against demons, are besieged by demonic possessions, and launch a rescue attempt. Kallie is a fervent protagonist with an intriguing background; she lost her mother to cancer the year before and is estranged from her father. Her relationship with love interest Seth is sufficient if not predictable, but the standout among supporting characters is Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Dennard Bennett. He, like Kallie, has experienced loss—his wife and two daughters died in a plane crash— and watching his progress from investigating a simple murder case to an all-out demon war is, in many ways, more riveting than Kallie’s gradual revelation.
A leisurely opening is mere preparation for the fierce struggle to follow—and it’s more than worth the wait.Pub Date: April 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0692356760
Page Count: -
Publisher: Ink-Stone Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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