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
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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