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
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
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
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