Pops with the liveliness of a young boy’s imagination but often lacks the sharper narrative focus to make sense of it all.
Debut sci-fi of sorts, spanning multiple dimensions and topics.
Born in a particularly multicultural area of Wisconsin, Oliver J. Oscar grew up with a group of friends from a variety of backgrounds, including Shu, a Chinese girl whose family runs a grocery store, and Judah, a Jewish boy whose father runs a hospital. The first half of the novel is devoted to Oliver’s childhood adventures with hints of the fantastical: a thwarted mugging; local football games; the loss of Oliver’s father, a Marine fighting in Iraq killed only after saving “three thousand children’s lives.” Attending MIT at the age of 16, Oliver goes on to a glorious life of charity and corporate work in New York City only to find himself entranced by a philosophy known as Verbum Victus—essentially, a movement aimed at the banishing of negative thinking as a key to success. Verbum Victus allows Oliver to enter a “Search World,” which manages to be even more fantastical than the real one. Adventuring with the same group of friends from his childhood, Oliver finds himself in the year 3500 A.D., making his way across a hostile land, facing everything from pirates on the Great Lakes to drug dealers in the New York Public Library. A whirlwind of characters and action, the story ranges from periods of slow development to furious portions of activity. Slowed occasionally by overwrought prose—e.g., “We were in need, and we could use the flying bikes, but we were scared because of our past, and we hated the flying bikes because of the kids who had always beat us up”—the book maintains a steady stream of creativity even if that imagination doesn’t always lend itself to a navigable story. With characters that tend to be good or bad and settings that swarm with flying saucers, lasers, CIA agents, militants, Native Americans and a host of prodigious young people, readers might get lost in the cascade of wild adventure.
Pops with the liveliness of a young boy’s imagination but often lacks the sharper narrative focus to make sense of it all.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9898675-9-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Infinite Dimensions
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2014
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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