Literary know-it-alls will cackle over the reappearance of Millon de Floss, the Hay-on-Wye reference, and the notion that...
The seventh romp through time, space, and literary arcana for beleaguered superheroine Thursday Next (One of Our Thursdays is Missing, 2011, etc.).
Thursday’s going through a bad patch. She’s walked with a cane since a botched assassination attempt. She’s lost the chance to head up SO-27, the Special Ops Network, to Phoebe Smalls, and has been made chief librarian at the Wessex All-You-Can-Eat-at-Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library Service instead. She frets over the kidnapping of her daughter, Jenny, who’s nothing more than a mind worm planted in her memory by her nemesis, Aornis. Her son Friday, who expected to be one of the Chronoguard elite and repeatedly rescue civilization, has received a Letter of Destiny telling him that he’ll kill Gavin Watkins and spend the next 40 years in prison. Her genius child Tuesday is having difficulty producing a shield that will annul the asteroid-smiting scheduled to descend on Swindon in a day or so. And every so often, Thursday realizes she isn’t herself anymore, but a Day Player, one of several synthetic replicas of herself let loose by Krantz in violation of the Unlicensed Nonevolutionary Life-Forms on the Mainland Act. Are Goliath, the scourge of the world conglomerate, and Jack Schitt, intent on planetary domination, responsible for any of this? Not the immediate problem, as Thursday must first figure out why racy 13th-century novels of St. Zvlkx are being vandalized, deal with Enid Blyton aficionados who favor the very unpolitically correct versions of her works, and escort the Righteous Man to the smite zone, where his presence will skew the incoming smite further out of town. Looming on the horizon is the dreaded confrontation with the Dark Reading Matter.
Literary know-it-alls will cackle over the reappearance of Millon de Floss, the Hay-on-Wye reference, and the notion that books and their upkeep really matter. Those less addicted to puns, time warps, and intergalactic humor will reach for the Excedrin.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02502-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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