Not always easy to follow, but earnest and wholeheartedly entertaining.
In this superhero sci-fi adventure, Minnick’s (Marshal Book II: Superstar the Harbinger, 2011, etc.) lanky, blue-skinned alien hero returns to battle vampires in space and exploding penguins in Greenland.
Marshal and members of the HERO (Heroic Emergency Response Organization) team are sent to Greenland to rescue a research station that lost contact soon after reporting that penguins were attacking. The team, which includes Heather (aka Superstar), who has super strength and speed, verifies the existence of the hostile penguins—of the explosive variety—and also faces polar bears and untrustworthy Eskimos. Before long, the rescue team might need to be rescued itself. The novel is really two stories: HERO in Greenland, and officers viewing a recording of Marshal’s memories to learn what happened to a space station where Marshal was once posted—a station that, along with its 157 residents, was lost. Some of the story feels as if it were written with the assumption that readers are familiar with the two previous books in the series—the origins of HERO and its members aren’t made clear, for instance—but that shouldn’t distract readers from enjoying the taut action scenes, as when Marshal and the station crew combat vampires that can take the form of humans. Minnick wisely keeps his multiple narratives moving, and the stories bounce back and forth quite often; it’s a frenzied approach that largely works. However, with few breaks or indications of a transition, it can sometimes be disorienting: A scene in the snow with HERO member Dauntless is immediately followed by a scene with Marshal and a vampire pinned to a wall. Numerous grammatical and spelling errors are hard to ignore—Eskimo becomes “Eskimoe,” for instance—and characters can be superficial, particularly the women, whose descriptions are almost exclusively physical: e.g., well-endowed, “voluptuous” and in possession of an attention-grabbing “tush.” But Minnick excels in the action/sci-fi genre, dishing solid one-liners—“No one is authorized to die on me today”—fun references to other works (a Gen. Solo makes an appearance), and more than one “Kapow!” straight from 1960s Batman.
Not always easy to follow, but earnest and wholeheartedly entertaining.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-1477266366
Page Count: 396
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2014
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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