A well-paced, diverting Mars-survival adventure with a wobbly blend of science and mystical fantasy.
Celine Red Cloud, first girl born to a human colony on Mars, teams up with Alexander, an untrustworthy visiting rich kid, on a dangerous expedition to find her father, lost somewhere in the mysterious Martian terrain.
Hunter’s debut is an assured YA sci-fi novel despite fuzzy science that morphs into fantasy and magic whenever convenient (or inconvenient) to the plot. Hundreds of years in the future, adolescent Celine is the only juvenile in a struggling Mars colony. Having been born there, she is literally the first “Martian girl.” But her life is in upheaval. Her father disappeared while scouting for mineral deposits, and the settlement’s shady safety director seems less interested in finding him than in courting Celine’s mom. The colony’s disappointed financier, tycoon Alexander Rittenhouse, visits from Earth to determine the unproductive compound’s future. Celine latches onto teen Alex Rittenhouse—the older man’s clone-cum-son—assuming he’ll have the resources to help her locate Dad. But Alex (whose money has also made him a reality TV superstar) is a spoiled, sneaky knockoff of his father, and the boy’s feelings for Celine are mixed with scorn and interest for ratings and self-aggrandizement as they head for the sandstorm-swept, volcanic Martian canyons on an unauthorized, dangerous rescue attempt. Moreover, Celine is having flashes of heightened senses and glowing eyes. Is she becoming something not quite human? Adding a multicultural flavor, as well as a layer of occult spirituality, is the fact that Celine and her father share a Cherokee heritage, and she communes shamanistically long-distance with a grandmother on Earth. Although the plot wraps up satisfactorily, Hunter throws readers curveballs (or curvemeteors, take your choice) with a rather puzzling time-related plot twist and suggestions of generations-old eugenics experiments, military conspiracies, even a pre-existing Martian civilization persisting like ghosts (à la Ray Bradbury) that affects Earth’s visitors, both human and animal. The result is an entertaining SF-adventure narrative that nonetheless raises as many questions as it answers, possibly laying groundwork for a sequel.
A well-paced, diverting Mars-survival adventure with a wobbly blend of science and mystical fantasy.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-92260-6
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Bayada Publishing House
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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