A taxing text, but readers prepared to do the work will find some grand and gripping concepts here.
A war erupts on a heaven-like planet and spills over to Earth, embroiling a cast of characters in the desperate birth of a new age for mankind.
Early on in Lavanway’s complex, problematic work, a main character has a dream. When he wakes, he finds the dividing line between dreaming and waking disturbingly blurred: “It had been going on before I dreamed it, and it had continued after I awoke.” Readers who grapple with Lavanway’s dense, incantatory prose for more than a few chapters will feel the same way: the threads of his narrative are often completely lost in the profuse detail of his imagined alternate reality—but the ultimate sensation also has some of the good qualities of being trapped inside a dream. On one surface level, this is a very old story of rebellion in Heaven. In the perfect alien world of Antecedeon, all is peace and harmony among its older and wiser inhabitants, when gradually younger spirits, dubbing themselves the New Order, grow impatient with the perfection all around them (and with Antecedeon’s wise and benevolent solitary male patriarch—no explanation is offered why a perfect world would need such an anachronistic feature). As the New Order spreads its resistance across space and dimensions to Earth, a story evolves that is both evocatively detailed and maddeningly vague. Lavanway has the courage to envision what seems at first to be an entire cosmology, and that’s no small undertaking. He has a vigorous talent for description, which is often pitted against sentences such as, “One of the main reasons behind the World Order’s campaign to bring immortality and immersive interconnectivity to the global population was to preserve the World Order’s bank of human assets and ensure control over the human resource pool upon which the World Order elites floated.” The work shares the apocalyptic, phantasmal sensibility of the biblical book of Revelation, and includes a section at the end citing specific religious passages that inspired much of the story.
A taxing text, but readers prepared to do the work will find some grand and gripping concepts here.Pub Date: May 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-0976800439
Page Count: 408
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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