A commendable sci-fi series launch spearheaded by a remarkable heroine.
In this debut novel, a new world power targets a woman with rare abilities.
Denver emergency room nurse Valerie Russell is shocked by her appearance one morning: The 35-year-old now looks 20. With no time to ponder the phenomenon, she leaves for a 12-hour shift at a facility two hours away. Upon her arrival, her car suddenly dies and Valerie passes out. After regaining consciousness, she guides others, who have passed out as well, to the facility. According to reports, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims an electric surge has affected people globally and wants to see those who have lost consciousness for “observation.” But Valerie’s greatest concern is her 2-year-old son, Caleb, back at home with the nanny (Valerie’s husband, Scott, is at work). Meanwhile, her father, Mike Burton, has answers to what’s transpiring. Some people have a no-longer-dormant gene that allows them to absorb electricity. Valerie belongs to a more elite group with powers capable of much more. While she races to find Caleb and Scott, formidable individuals, having anticipated the gene’s awakening, want her for her abilities. Their purpose is sinister: mass genocide of those not carrying the gene. In this first installment of a sci-fi trilogy, the plot’s extraordinary event is worldwide, but Arnold wisely concentrates on Valerie in the U.S. There are hints of others who share her gifts, which open avenues for the series to explore later. Valerie is an exceptional protagonist: She has survivalist skills (courtesy of Mike) and shrewdly distrusts people, including reputed friends of her father. The story’s villain is likewise sharply defined. The CDC initially appears nefarious before one individual becomes the unmitigated baddie. Though the author’s near-breakneck pace is exhilarating, it doesn’t leave much room for standout supporting characters, like Valerie’s resilient female ally Hyka Major. But that’s something the forthcoming volumes could easily rectify—and something for readers to look forward to.
A commendable sci-fi series launch spearheaded by a remarkable heroine.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73246-740-8
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Immortal Works Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 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
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
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