A grand, revelatory saga that continues to unfold.
In this YA sci-fi sequel, Litwack (The Light of Reason, 2016, etc.) pushes his characters into new physical, mental, and emotional realms as they encounter an unusual, tech-based society.
A thousand years ago, society crumbled into the Darkness. Now, the Temple of Light and its vicars guide the survivors with a stern hand, wielding miracles with dimly understood technology from a secret cache called the keep. Orah and her husband, Nathaniel, have washed ashore in a strange land after sailing from the village of Little Pond. They hope to locate the creators of the keep’s wonders, but instead, they’re greeted by children. Kara, the oldest, is merely 16, and she takes the couple to a decrepit village that’s repaired haphazardly by robots. It also contains devices that can generate a cooked meal from nothing—in seconds. It’s all presided over by the mentor, an elderly man who controls his wheelchair with his mind. He says that the village is full of children and failing machines because the dreamers—the adults who maintained the technology—left three years ago. They “ascended” into a mountain fortress, and everyone in the village hopes for their return. To understand the mentor’s tale better, Orah and Nathaniel visit with “the people of the earth,” who live off the land nearby. Their leaders, Annabel and Caleb, are committed to living without machines and claim that the dreamers’ hope is a dangerous one. In this second volume of The Seekers series, Litwack continues his enthralling tour of a future crippled by hubris and spiritual negligence. Readers will find it heartbreaking when the village children play with inert black devices—smartphones—that used to “let us speak to each other from far away and showed us the way if we were lost.” Throughout, the author explores the area between a soulful grounding in the physical world and the scholarly itch that makes one ask, “Why would we be given a universe so vast and wonderful unless our minds were meant to grow to encompass it all?” The astonishing truth about the dreamers is revealed in careful, dramatic stages. The protagonists’ courage—and Litwack’s magisterial plotting—will spur readers on to the next installment.
A grand, revelatory saga that continues to unfold.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62253-436-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Evolved Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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