An action-packed thriller full of authentic human drama skillfully depicted.
In this debut novel, a young blind woman participates in an experiment that could restore her sight but becomes unwittingly drawn into a dark, scientific conspiracy.
Audra Carter lost her sight when she was 10 years old in a tragic car accident that killed her mother. But it’s hard to consider this 24-year-old woman disabled because she’s so independent. She’s a DJ who spins the “coolest ambient beats” and is gifted with a high degree of “blindsight”: “The remarkable ability among some of the visually impaired to sense objects even though they have no visual field, even if totally blind.” In fact, Audra can maneuver a bicycle and fend off an assailant. Her father, Jenson, a scientist working on a possible cure for blindness, assembles a group of test subjects, including his own daughter, and administers an experiment. The experiment fails, but when the test subjects start to turn up murdered, Jenson becomes a “person of interest.” He suspects his collaborator, Stefan Vanek, is somehow involved. Then Audra is kidnapped and used as a lab rat to develop “mysterious skills” that can be employed in nefarious activities. Mallery artfully combines two genres in one book: a crime drama that follows Jenson’s race to find Audra before it’s too late, and an SF tale about the technological possibilities for expanding human potential. The author also includes a surprisingly thoughtful portrayal of the experience of blindness, rendered lucidly and poignantly: “After the accident took her sight, she often sensed something beyond the void. Unheard voices, unseen faces. Back then, it had been the seeds of nightmares, of waking screaming at night, her father rushing to her room, holding her tight.” But this is primarily a thriller, and while the action is briskly paced, Mallery does tend to favor the heavy-handedly melodramatic, an inclination evidenced by his uninhibited use of italics. Nevertheless, this tale is an intelligently conceived work, driven more than anything else by fully developed characters in the throes of real human emotions.
An action-packed thriller full of authentic human drama skillfully depicted.Pub Date: June 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64437-061-2
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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