by D.P. Sparling ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
Bloomsday meets The Twilight Zone via a winding and densely philosophical sci-fi tale packed into a slim volume.
In a future, high-tech Dublin, bounty hunters search for clones who possess a momentous secret linked to a distant planet.
This literary sci-fi novel from Sparling (The Western Killer, 2015) takes place largely in future Dublin, and there is a too-easy temptation to associate it with Joyce’s Dubliners. Just add robots and crank up the lyrical/bardic quality of the storyteller’s language and ruminations. A free-roaming and chronologically recursive narrative reveals that, thanks to geography, Dublin has largely weathered the climate change that spawned jungles throughout the rest of Ireland. But society remains at the mercy of organized crime, and a cruel new hostage scheme has kidnappers plugging comatose victims into transparent automaton exoskeletons wired with bombs. When they go on bank-robbing sprees, police cannot interfere because the hulks are technically innocent bystanders. High in the rackets is a woman named Quennie. Her one-time mentor and the father of her son, Rohan, was one of four clones commissioned by a mysterious adventurer and space-war fugitive guarding a consciousness-altering resource on a distant planet. Knowing the mob would never leave him alone about it, he seeded himself in the scattered clones so the secret would survive. Now bounty hunters are targeting the clones, and Rohan must complete the quest. In the interstitials and marginalia of the drifting narrative, Sparling laments the addled condition of poor Homo sapiens, burdened with self-destructive greed, lust, violence, addictions, and existential dread. Characters thirst for meaning and hope in a transitory universe where God seems to have found better things to do—lofty thoughts indeed, beyond ray-gun stuff, strongly expressed with a great deal of passion. Wisely, the material has the page count of a trim book of verse rather than the brick-thick exegesis preferred by a few scribes of experimental sci-fi. Nor does Sparling make the mistake of imitating the style of sci-fi’s grandmaster poet/philosopher (and confirmed Hibernophile) Ray Bradbury. A subplot about a war between galactic empire kingdoms, the “Khans” and the “Cantonese,” is either a jarring, far-out intrusion or a coded metaphor for more mundane, terrestrial matters—as could be the entire novel, for that matter.
Bloomsday meets The Twilight Zone via a winding and densely philosophical sci-fi tale packed into a slim volume.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Robinne Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2017
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.
When Solène Marchand takes her 12-year-old daughter to a concert by the hottest boy band on the planet, she doesn't expect to fall in love with one of the singers.
Middle-aged art gallery owner Solène hasn’t dated since her divorce, but when her ex-husband buys their daughter and a group of her friends tickets to Vegas and a backstage concert experience, then backs out at the last minute, she steps in as escort. The five guys in the wildly popular English boy band August Moon appeal to women of all ages, but Hayes, the brains behind the group’s success, flirts with Solène at the concert meet and greet, invites them to a party after the show, then pursues her once she gets back to Los Angeles. He’s only 20 and he’s incredibly famous; his attention is flattering and heady. The two fall into an affair that’s supposed to be light and easy, but before long they can’t ignore their intense emotional attachment. Solène is hesitant to tell her daughter, but when she procrastinates, Isabelle learns about it through an online tabloid, which damages their relationship and leaves Solène open to censure from her ex. Then, once the affair goes viral, she experiences the darker side of Hayes’ fan base. What started out as a jaunty adventure turns into an emotionally fraught journey, and Solène must decide what she’s willing to risk for her happiness and what she won’t risk for her daughter’s. Actress Lee, who appeared in Fifty Shades Darker, debuts with a beautifully written novel that explores sex, love, romance, and fantasy in moving, insightful ways while also examining a woman’s struggle with aging and sexism, with a nod at the tension between celebrity and privacy.
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12590-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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