An inventive work of alternate history.
A novel imagines a time jump that places World War II 100 years earlier.
It is 1942, and Jim Bridger Edwards—a former carnival performer and current captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—has been sent to Soviet-occupied Iran to shore up the Trans-Iranian Railway for military use. “I get my job done,” muses Jim (who harbors multiple personalities), “so the army doesn’t ask too many questions about how sane I am. And they let me play with high explosives.” His secretive Soviet hosts are trouble enough, but when the sun suddenly moves backward in the sky and people and vehicles—or parts of them—begin to disappear, Jim realizes he has much larger problems to deal with than an old railroad. An invisible, rubbery wall has descended across a whole section of the globe, plunging everything within its perimeter back to an earlier time period. Along with Mariya, a Russian woman of dubious loyalties, and Loki, a mysterious man with some knowledge of time travel, Jim must make his way through Europe to put a stop to the Nazi war machine. In this new reality, the United States is even more vulnerable than it was in the previous one. If Hitler’s armies reach North America, they won’t be met with the technology from 1942—but rather from 1842. Cozort (Wrath of Athena, 2016, etc.) writes in a breathless, accessible prose that gallops through the story with little pause. Although the sci-fi premise is rather complex, he unspools it with a directness and ease that rarely leaves the reader confused. The mix of time periods—with particular attention paid to the armaments of each—should please fans of military history, and the author’s imaginative blending of worlds will likely appeal to the broader speculative audience. Peripheral characters feel a bit flat, but Jim’s psychological state remains complex and compelling. The first book in a planned trilogy, it leaves off at a place that should assuredly hook readers for the next installment.
An inventive work of alternate history.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5451-1823-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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