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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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