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
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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