Vivid perils and well-realized characters and concepts fuel a space/time voyage.
Four couples embarking on a one-way starship expedition aim to colonize a distant world—if their own psychoses and betrayals don’t kill them first.
A European project on a future Earth—beset by disasters and in danger of becoming uninhabitable—institutes a one-way, deep-space mission. Filled with automated systems, durable robots (humanoid and nonhumanoid), and hibernation capsules, an array of Repopulation, Expansion, Annexation Program ships is dispatched from the solar system, each headed for potentially habitable, faraway worlds. Aboard REAP crafts are couples of diverse ethnicities, backgrounds, and science expertise, selected to breed and raise descendants in new outposts to preserve the human race. But the dark sides of the voyagers emerge early as REAP No. 23 launches. A high-caste Hindu genius turns out to be a sociopath who bribed his way on to the crew (“He used his broad smile and a transformed happy face frequently, as a tool, as a weapon, as a distraction”). His faithless trophy wife is having an affair with the cheerful Chinese-American captain. Another man, moody and alienated, starts giving in to the worst Islamic fundamentalist traits in his Persian ancestry. As Earth recedes forever, lust and selfish mania threaten the onboard minisociety with doom before a fraction of the journey is even completed. Perry, who wrote Between Love and Money (2007) as Martin Filson, spins a taut, resonant tale based on one of the most familiar tropes in sci-fi. The author tightens the screws of claustrophobia and suspense with aplomb and well-conceived characterizations, which are concerned just as much with matters of emotion (maybe more so) as with circuitry and astrophysics. When the narrative crosscuts to Earth, it turns into another, less urgent story entirely. The chronicle leapfrogs over thousands of tumultuous years—thanks to Einstein’s theory of relativity—while nations rise and decay and humanity loses, regains, and loses again concrete memories of REAP and its meaning. The author provides an afterword detailing the future history inferred in the plotline, and it leaves readers with a sense that much material remains to be mined from the rich universe Perry has persuasively imagined. But readers should come away satisfied with this 18,000-year journey all the same.
Vivid perils and well-realized characters and concepts fuel a space/time voyage.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-2742-4
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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