A timely, winning adventure that brings up serious questions about technology and medical research.
Kaczmarowski’s (Moon Rising, 2014) scientific thriller pits a medical researcher against the government.
Dr. Jane Dixon is a San Francisco Bay Area scientist studying animal intelligence. She conducts experiments on both a rat and a dog to see whether exposure to a particular virus will give them humanlike intelligence and other skills, such as the ability to use tools. Jane is struggling with other issues at work, however, such as dwindling research funding and a boss who’s romantically interested in her. On the homefront, she has an autistic son named Robbie, and she’s desperately trying to hold on to her latest nanny. After dark, her laboratory comes alive in an astonishing manner when the rat (suitably named Einstein) lets himself out of his cage to mix things up a bit. It turns out that Jane’s virus has enabled Einstein to communicate—not by speaking, but by typing into a smartphone. Bear, the dog, isn’t a great typist, but he’s also become an intelligent, sentient being. The animals’ eyes glow an electric blue—a haunting image that becomes a hallmark of infected creatures throughout the novel. As Jane realizes the significance of what she’s done—including the fact that the virus has become communicable—she wonders about its potential to help her son and others with autism. Unsurprisingly, the Centers for Disease Control takes an interest in her work and demands that the program be shut down. However, Jane can’t give up the hope of a cure for her son and plans to escape to Canada with Robbie, Einstein, and Bear. With government agents in pursuit, she makes a decision that will affect not just her son, but potentially all life on Earth. Over the course of the novel, Jane’s actions convincingly come across as earnest rather than foolhardy, and Kaczmarowski does a deft job of making all the characters sympathetic, which is no small feat when the cast includes both humans and animals. The novel’s focus on the desire for scientific advancement despite possible dire consequences is reminiscent of Michael Crichton’s work, and Jane’s run from the government has a classic adventure feel that’s equally satisfying. Overall, Kaczmarowski has written a smart, exciting thriller that draws on enough contemporary anxieties to make it an entertaining and chilling ride.
A timely, winning adventure that brings up serious questions about technology and medical research.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0990410928
Page Count: 380
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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