A wild metaphysical adventure that may leave readers scratching their heads.
In Shuford’s sci-fi novel, a brilliant physics major’s breakthrough may explain the fracturing reality of a housewife on the run from her former life.
No matter what her doctor husband says, Katherine Jameson feels an inexplicable sense of wrongness. It may have started small—losing track of time—but it quickly escalates to major rifts in her world, as when a meteorite crater on the beach suddenly disappears. Due to her husband’s increasingly hostile, controlling nature, Katherine is compelled to run for her life, only to slip out of control. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Billy Reltin has just started college, where he’s bombarded with new experiences that he’s unprepared for, despite his scientific brilliance. The previous star physics student is hostile, Billy’s attractive friend has an interest in mind-expanding substances, and Billy has the feeling that he’s very close to some conceptual breakthrough—a “quantum loophole” that might just explain Katherine’s fractured reality. Shuford’s novel sits firmly within the lineage of metaphysical, reality-questioning sci-fi, from Philip K. Dick to The Matrix. However, while the premise is intriguing, this adventure doesn’t quite engage readers since its metaphysical bent often takes attention away from character development. When Katherine has mixed thoughts about her mother (aka the “Thought Police”) or when Billy faces the problem of choosing a seat in class, Shuford’s characters are identifiable and sympathetic; but when characters occasionally turn out to be manifestations of the subconscious or derived from another layer of reality, readers might yearn for more attention paid to the real characters’ dilemmas and choices. Instead, Shuford explains the nine circles of reality via his characters’ lecturing one another and through fictional encyclopedia entries. Similarly, a novel with the subtitle “Adventures Across Conflicting Realities” may have a thematic reason for reminding readers that they’re reading a book—i.e., “that is a story not contained in the current scenario”—but such comments interrupt the reading process. Torn between Katherine’s adventure and Billy’s metaphysical discovery, the novel doesn’t excel at either.
A wild metaphysical adventure that may leave readers scratching their heads.Pub Date: May 26, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 269
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
