An imaginative, free-wheeling SF adventure with a strong focus on family.
Four girls and their running coach develop supernatural powers in this debut novel.
Middle-school girls Cassie, Bridget, and Jillian and junior high student Nicole are known as the Blugees, named after the blue markers on one of their running trails. Their coach—Bridget and Nicole’s father; Jillian’s uncle—is just called Dad. When out running one day, Dad and the Blugees come across a mysterious blue tree that engulfs them in blue pollen. From this moment on, all the girls manifest superpowers: Jillian can manipulate time; Cassie has extraordinary speed; Bridget’s thinking skills are greatly enhanced; and Nicole can fly. At first, the girls simply enjoy their new abilities. But then their future selves send them a warning: A superhuman named Kirk has come back in time to kill the Blugees and change history. As the girls grow up, they must increase their powers further and defeat Kirk. But even if they are successful, new challenges will await. A radioactive meteor is heading for Earth and if unchecked will wipe out all life. Can Dad and the Blugees save the world? In this SF series opener, Morse writes in the first person, narrating from Dad’s perspective in an unsettling mix of past and present tense (often within paragraphs). This stylistic quirk aside, the prose and dialogue are straightforward and the story simply told. The plot itself, though a wonderfully tangled potpourri of time paradoxes and superpower problems and solutions, is navigated calmly. One of the strengths of the story is that it unfolds across many years, allowing readers to follow the Blugees’ growth—collectively and as individuals—from girls to young women to parents. Dad remains an affectionate elder statesman, maturing into a grandfather, and the Blugees’ children are all the more relatable for being the offspring of established characters. While the tale’s pacing seems leisurely at times, several of the plot crises return in unexpected ways, adding to the sense of peril. Readers of all ages should enjoy the ride.
An imaginative, free-wheeling SF adventure with a strong focus on family.Pub Date: March 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-69362-861-0
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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