Sumptuous sci-fi with originality to spare.
Cray’s sci-fi thriller stars a heroine who battles a hidden race determined to curtail humanity’s growth.
Andra Barger is a diminisher. Utilizing arcane abilities, she stalks pregnant women and surreptitiously places a special gel on their palms. The gel chemically alters the unborn children, “diminishing” them by preventing special powers from developing. Andra performs this chilling work at the behest of the Cinüe, a hidden branch of humanity, who have managed their evolution. The Cinüe have sequestered themselves in a place called Edenshire, but every 50 years, the Sugar Dandruff Council—nine individuals who assign Andra’s targets—vote on whether to maintain or repeal the Jeremiah Maybe Diminishing Act, which according to Cinüe leader Asantha Cooray VIII, is about “keeping everyone equal...and keeping the peace.” While on assignment in Hawaii, Andra runs into Wade, an old flame who acts as a “mailman” for the Cinüe. He delivers a message from Asantha herself: “Sugar Dandruff Council convening in three days for renewal vote. You’ll be my proxy.” Andra’s first instinct is to vote against renewing the Diminishing Act. When she eventually meets Asantha, however, so begins the unraveling of the world’s deepest secrets. In this visionary work, Cray (Friends from 4 A.M., 2012, etc.) marries heady concepts to kaleidoscopic tableaux while keeping both in service to his characters’ humanity. The work continually surprises, as in the line about Wade’s “necrospondence,” a special candle that’s like “peeking inside a Faberge egg, only the ‘egg’ could spy upon another place.” Cray also delights in the most gorgeous settings, from the opening on a Hawaiian beach to Australia’s red sandstone monolith Uluru, which “sparkled whenever the fading twilight hit the coarse quartz and feldspar.” The narrative’s whiplash pacing is perfect with a species at stake, and Cray parlays every plot element—including Jackson, Andra’s terminally ill brother—into a satisfying twist. Ultimately, this adventure is a linguistic feast and a moral challenge that readers should be eager to pass along.
Sumptuous sci-fi with originality to spare.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-940317-07-6
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Third Quandary Books
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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