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CHALLENGES OF THE GODS

Name: CHALLENGES OF THE GODS
Author: C. Hofsetz
ISBN: 978-1-5092-2432-6

From the Challenges of the Gods series , Vol. 1

by C. Hofsetz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 2019

While convoluted in parts, this impossible-mission tale features an appealing hero.

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A comedic sci-fi novel focuses on one man’s undercover quest to destroy Earth.

Debut author Hofsetz presents Mike Pohlt: a brilliant, young astrophysicist who has just come out of a coma. The problem is that, upon awakening, Mike suffers from amnesia. He cannot remember any of his friends, and many aspects of life on Earth baffle him. This is true because Mike is not really Mike. Unbeknown to those around him, the body of Mike is inhabited by a man named Zeon from the planet Jora. Jora is a lot like Earth, only more advanced in many ways. For instance, on Jora the idea of getting in a car that is not a self-driving vehicle would be ridiculous. Zeon’s task (while he impersonates Mike) is simple: He must destroy Earth. Due to circumstances put in place by creator Gods (along with some components of multiverse theory), either Earth or Jora must be obliterated if the other is to survive. Zeon doesn’t really want to annihilate this world of colorful cars and American football, but he must if his own people are to live. So Zeon, along with Mike’s friend Ravi Chandrasekhar, goes about developing technology that makes him very rich. This technology could also result in an end to Earth. Things are complicated further by a dreamlike realm populated by people called Protectors. In the world of the Protectors (which Zeon, as Mike, also traverses), humans from Earth battle warriors from Jora. Who will emerge victorious? Hofsetz delivers an intricate setup for a complex story. But despite Gods, Protectors, Messengers (who explain all), and the rules of different worlds, everything boils down to kill or be killed for Zeon. Later chapters incorporate odd twists and action scenes full of explosions and military maneuvers, yet the energetic tale is at its most memorable when focusing on Zeon. He always maintains a sense of humor. This is the case when he reflects that “Earth has some crazy people, and they’re good at their craziness.” He is altogether likable and self-effacing despite the fact that he has been sent to terminate everyone around him. Throughout it all, readers are kept in suspense about how such a struggle will end.

While convoluted in parts, this impossible-mission tale features an appealing hero.

Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5092-2432-6

Page Count: 374

Publisher: Wild Rose Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.