Relishable lead characters front an enthusiastic, jaunty adventure.
In Aubin’s sci-fi series opener, a young cadet, part of a mission to save humanity by finding planets to colonize, stumbles onto a dangerous secret.
Zax, like many other teens, was born on a vessel known simply as the Ship and has trained since he was a child. It’s been millennia since humans, facing extinction on a dying Earth, built the Ship, during which time they’ve searched for habitable planets. Zax is a bright trainee who’s earned enough credits to put him on top of the Leaderboard, making his dream of becoming a pilot a distinct possibility. He’s unfortunately the object of ridicule—he vomits practically on cue during FTL (Faster-Than-Light) Transit. But he proves himself during a refueling operation when an attacking spacecraft surprises the Ship’s fighters. The Flight Boss praises Zax and fellow cadet Kalare for rescuing lives, but Zax earns the ire of trainer Cyrus, who winds up condemned and humiliated. The Boss, impressed by Zax and Kalare, proclaims he’ll mentor one of them, support that could garner the mentored a “gazillion extra points on the Leaderboard”. The two must endure rigorous Marine training, and Zax tries to avoid a revenge-minded Cyrus. They’ll have a chance to scout a new planet, already inhabited by aliens…and something considerably more shocking. Aubin’s debut novel launches a series; it merely touches on numerous elements that will most likely resurface later. Readers get little insight, for example, into the frequently mentioned concept of being “Plugged In,” which involves an implant that links a person to the Ship and allows private communication. Aubin does, however, slowly inject suspense, especially when Zax learns a secret that may be fatal for him to know. Most characters, like Marine officers, are belligerent, undermining Zax and Kalare. But those two are plenty likable. Zax is persistently ambitious and perky, and the talkative Kalare can’t suppress her giggles. The novel uses understandable jargon and sprints through the narrative until the end, when Zax makes a decision that could have drastic consequences—and aptly sets the stage for a sequel.
Relishable lead characters front an enthusiastic, jaunty adventure.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9970708-1-1
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Lekanyane Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2016
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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