A fun space romp that’s equal parts goofiness and grandeur.
Melbourne’s sci-fi adventure stars an accountant swept up in the battle against a reality-altering weapon.
In the year 20018, Percival Gynt is an accountant on the planet Sanctuary-8. As he waits for the morning train, a beautiful woman approaches. She asks him, “Are you honest and clever and kind...and does danger always seem to find you?” He eventually answers, “Yes.” She kisses him, apologizes, and steals his bowler hat. Before he can give chase, two police officers take him into custody. They bring him to a government agent named Fred, who explains that the woman who kissed him is Millicent Lamb, the former nanny of an 11-year-old named Kevin. Kevin is missing, and Fred knows that Percival—last survivor of the Gynt Massacre—has the guts to retrieve the boy. The first catch is that he must team up with Officer Um (a froglike Indulian). The second catch is that Kevin embodies an ancient evil known as the Rider, which must not be reunited with the Engine of Armageddon, a machine that can (and does) erase large swaths of reality. Percival will cross paths with the enchanting Tarot (aka Millicent), Aryan soldiers of the Nth Realm, and Matthew “Mouse” Holden, former apprentice to the magician Illuminari, whose death began this crisis. For audiences who like their space operas thoroughly daffy, author Melbourne (Archenemies, 2007) offers an all-you-can-read buffet of batty goodness. Like Douglas Adams, Melbourne’s ideas are off-kilter and funny, but—as importantly—his execution is off-kilter and funny, too. One scene, for example, features alien blobs called Fummers that are “humming a tune that sounded strangely like that old Earth ditty, ‘Hey Ya.’ ” The romance between Percival and Tarot is as charming as it is torturous. Elsewhere, mentions of Grimsouls (reanimated killing machines) being the product of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline skewer a future in which corporations join humanity in colonizing space. Longtime sci-fi fans should appreciate Melbourne’s creative endurance as he crafts an ever twisting plot that lets dust settle on none of his characters, including the legendarily “not dead” Vargoth Gor.
A fun space romp that’s equal parts goofiness and grandeur.Pub Date: May 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9998748-0-6
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Ruesday Books
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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