A whimsical, thought-provoking, if sometimes opaque, look at the magic of existence.
An experimental novel loosely explores consciousness and existence.
It is September 2022. The narrator of this brief, swirling tale is registering to audit classes at Princeton University. The audience is soon addressed directly. Readers will travel “upon every verb” that Clovis writes. And so connections are examined in a series of short chapters that are often no more than a paragraph or two. For instance, Chapter 14 declares that “story, myth and metaphor connect US in the quantum universe at the speed of light.” Myth is a thread that binds all that humans know: “From the ancient pyramids to space sciences of NASA there is the connection of myth.” Other themes that are weaved into the work include references to Albert Einstein. Chapter 24 reminds readers that Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics on Nov. 9, 1922. Then there are reflections on the oddities of quantum physics. Chapter 29 explains that the unseen energy in the quantum field is the Divine. Love is also important. It is love that is “the only reality that lies in the heart of creation.” The work concludes with a series of appendices. These portions, like the chapters of the book, are kept short. The appendices continue to investigate topics such as synchronicity, the concept that “mental and physical events are interrelated.” It is an idea that goes back to Jung, whose work mimics “aspects of Einstein’s theory of relativity.”
Even with all the diverse musings (and a list of references), the work comes in at under 50 pages. The chapters move from topic to topic without constraints. With such a cursory treatment of complex subjects, much is left open to interpretation. The audience may not have typically linked myth, NASA, and the labors of Einstein together, yet here they are. Readers are indeed set to travel upon the verbs of the writer. The journey certainly goes to places they might not expect. Yet some subjects can prove more puzzling than revelatory. Something may receive a brief mention once and then never again. Chapter 19 consists of how someone named Charlie Somma has spent a decade at Princeton, where “horticulture meets living landscapes.” The entire chapter consists of a single sentence. Who exactly Somma is and what he has to do with anything else in the book are left open to interpretation. Nor is the meaning of “horticulture meets living landscapes” entirely clear. Nevertheless, other portions prove to be strikingly distinct. Chapter 21 consists of one sentence: “And the still masked minority are trying to live through this Covid MOMENT.” It is a simple observation yet an astute one. The same can be said for a mention of the 10 millionth visitor to the Princeton University library. Items like 10 million library visitors, the famous Einstein, and a total lunar eclipse make for poetic imagery. That the eclipse occurred on Nov. 8, 2022, helps tie together a rough timeline. In the end, readers can do nearly endless traveling on the tangents the book has to offer. The universe has room for it all.
A whimsical, thought-provoking, if sometimes opaque, look at the magic of existence.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2022
ISBN: 9798765237472
Page Count: 102
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.
A graduate student studying an obscure horror author is visited by a haunting of her own.
Minerva Contreras, one of the protagonists of Mexican Canadian author Moreno-Garcia’s latest, has always had a thing for the dark side. As a girl in Mexico, she “preferred to slip into the tales of Shirley Jackson rather than go out dancing with her friends,” and as a grad student in 1998 Massachusetts, she’s writing her thesis on Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure horror author and H.P. Lovecraft contemporary who only published one novel during her lifetime, The Vanishing. Beatrice was an alum of the college where Minerva studies, but Minerva still struggles to find information about her, until one of Beatrice’s acquaintances, Carolyn Yates, agrees to let Minerva examine Beatrice’s personal papers, which contain the author’s account of the disappearance of her college roommate, a quirky Spiritualist named Virginia Somerset. As Minerva tries to figure out what happened to Virginia, things start getting weird—she starts hearing strange noises, and begins to wonder whether a student who went AWOL actually met with a bad end. She also begins to notice parallels between what’s happening and the stories she heard from her great-grandmother Alba, whose family endured horrific experiences at the hands of a witch in Mexico in 1908. The point of view shifts among Minerva, Alba, and Beatrice in their various time periods, a technique which Moreno-Garcia uses effectively; it’s impressive how she keeps the narrative tension running parallel in each one. The writing is beautiful, which is par for the course for Moreno-Garcia, and in Minerva, she has created a deeply original character, steely but yearning. This is yet another triumph from one of North America’s most exciting authors.
Suspenseful and terrifying; Moreno-Garcia hits it out of the park yet again.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780593874325
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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