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LOTUS PETALS

Name: LOTUS PETALS
Author: Elizabeth Ann Fenton
ISBN: 978-1-982222-89-5

A WAKE-UP CALL

by Elizabeth Ann Fenton ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A cerebral, multiple-timelines novel that squanders its premise with its dearth of drama.

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A survivalist and a yoga-loving teen occupy several timelines in a story that involves the threat of a nuclear attack.

There are three parallel realities in Fenton’s debut SF novel, the first book in a planned trilogy. In Reality A, Davis, an employee of the agency in charge of Oahu’s coastal defense system, arrives at work only to learn that a North Korean missile is headed straight for Honolulu. He sends out an emergency text to the public, then rushes home, grabs his cat, Merlin, and heads for his backyard bunker. A consummate prepper, Davis has stocked the bunker with the supplies needed for this eventuality—but he didn’t expect his 18-year-old neighbor, Lotus, to pound on the door and beg him to let her in. He does, and she begins to chant. Soon they hear that, although a missile struck the city, a larger war has been averted. In Reality B, Davis accidentally sends out an alert despite the fact that no missile is speeding through the sky. Davis’ estranged daughter, Hannah, reappears in his life and befriends Lotus. In Reality C, there is another false alarm—this time Davis isn’t at fault but becomes the fall guy anyway—but Lotus’ mother goes camping and experiences an earthquake. The three timelines unfold, connected by Merlin—who, in addition to being a cat, is an alien who can connect telepathically with his former owner, who now resides in another dimension—and the yogic power of Lotus’ chants. Fenton’s prose is direct and dialogue-heavy, introducing the book’s heady concepts through her characters’ conversation: “ ‘I don’t suppose you believe we can change timelines with imagination and prayer?’ ‘What do you mean by timelines?’ ‘I mean a shift into a different reality that exists in parallel. A timeline would be one version of reality in an infinite multiverse of possibilities.’ ” Despite the intriguing premise, the timelines end up being fairly similar to one another, and none of them is all that engrossing. In practice, this prospective series opener is far less about surviving a nuclear attack than it is about people doing and talking about yoga. Fenton seems to believe that such a practice can lead to world peace, but whether or not that is true, it doesn’t make for very compelling reading.

A cerebral, multiple-timelines novel that squanders its premise with its dearth of drama.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-1-982222-89-5

Page Count: -

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2020

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.