Ambitious sci-fi ideas hobbled by salacious wandering.
Allen (The Divine Miracle, 2011) offers the first in aplanned series of five YA time-travel adventures.
Clancy Millstone is a wealthy computer scientist whose wife, Rachel, recently passed away. He lives with his 14-year-old son, Richie, in their Jacksonville, Florida, mansion. One day, Clancy asks Richie’s friend Travis and cousin Matt to stop by to cheer Richie up, as he’s been depressed since his mother’s death. They take him out for pizza, where they meet up with more teens,and the large, cheery group later heads back to the mansion for a sleepover. The next day, the door to Clancy’s workshop is found open, and the kids discover an enormous vehicle inside. After they board it, they watch a video recorded by Clancy, who tells them that they’re about to embark on a time-travel adventure. The time machine is well-stocked with food, clothing, spare parts—everything Richie and his friends might need. Most astoundingly, it’s powered by a platinum water crystal—and, like any technology, the crystal can be used for good or evil. Soon, Richie and his crew embark on a dangerous voyage through time and, eventually, space. Allen’s elaborately framed narrative starts with an elderly Richie meeting his younger self and delves into the intriguing questions central to many time-travel tales: Are events set in stone, or is time fluid and changeable? He offers a world that’s rich in detail and writes most compellingly about the time machine itself: “As long as the platinum crystal was submerged in water at a certain depth, it would produce power almost indefinitely.” Allen’s penchant for such detail, however, also makes the dialogue cumbersome and the prose repetitive: People constantly speak with a “wry grin” or with “rolled eyes.” The novel is also distractingly preoccupied with exploring its characters’ sexuality, which has its place in YA fiction but not when it overshadows the plot; phrases like “lube our tubes” and “horse grade manhood” may turn away casual readers.
Ambitious sci-fi ideas hobbled by salacious wandering.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1625161765
Page Count: 574
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
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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