By the year 2047, following ecological collapse and the Petroleum Wars, vast areas of the globe are radioactive, governments have splintered into corporate fiefdoms, and mutating viruses are mopping up the few survivors. The commune of Ecosophia, in the American desert, is also dying, but maybe, using a revolutionary mental technique, one person can travel back into the past and change things. So, in the year 1773, Maggie Foster arrives naked in the middle of an earthquake at Coalbrookdale in the English Midlands. Here, the world’s first iron bridge will be built, accelerating the Industrial Revolution and the devastation that will follow. But what if, thought the Ecosophians, instead of standing for centuries, the bridge collapsed shortly after completion? Might this change the thrust and direction of the future? First, Maggie must worm her way into the community of 1773 by finding a job in the household of ironmaster Abraham Darby III, whose ambition is to build the very bridge that Maggie hopes to destroy. Abraham, a Quaker, refuses to allow his iron to be made into cannons, unlike his ambitious and unscrupulous neighbor and rival ironmaster John Wilkinson. But as Maggie becomes more and more integrated into the lives of the Darby family and the other people around her, the less sure she is that the Ecosophians’ chosen course of action will be effective. Time travel and its consequences are the least satisfactory aspects of this first novel, an otherwise richly evocative and fascinating piece of historical speculation.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-100259-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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