An appealing story about love between a recovering anorexic and a deaf would-be pastor barely survives veteran novelist Betts's (Souls Raised From the Dead, 1994, etc.) awkward flirtation with significance as she introduces a ghost and the battle at Waco. Luna Stone and Steve Grier leave North Carolina in April 1993 for California, where Steve has been offered a teaching job. The two plan to marry along the way. But as the journey begins, Luna, an artist who had been hospitalized in college for depression and anorexia, begins to have second thoughts. She has been supporting the two of them by doing medical illustrations while Steve finishes his dissertation, but she's beginning to realize that Steve is stingy and selfish. She's also obsessed with the FBI's attack on Koresh's compound and the consequent conflagration. And so Luna leaves Steve in Reno, takes her van, and heads to the nearby mountains to camp and think. An Army brat whose life has been regimented by a domineering father, she's also a lapsed Catholic who can't quite forget her religion. During the day she hikes trails and thinks about her life; at night she's visited both by a ghost and by a starving young boy. The ghost is Tamsen Donner, a member of the infamous Donner Party, whose survivors made it through the winter by eating the dead. The young boy, whom Luna befriends, is Sam, who'd been sold to—and has escaped from—a child-porn ring. When Sam and Luna move on to another camp, they meet Paul, whose plans to be a Lutheran minister have been disrupted by an accident that has left him deaf. A day-trip to Reno goes terribly wrong when Sam is kidnapped, but Luna and Paul eventually rescue him. Their love acknowledged, they are free to move forward, with Sam in tow. A pair of twentysomething lovers refreshingly reach out beyond themselves to act like grown-ups in a novel that succeeds in spite of itself.
Pub Date: May 9, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45072-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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