A solid beginning to a sci-fi series, with the promise of more adventures to come.
A teenager finds new challenges and otherworldly surprises in this debut novel.
At the start of her senior year in high school, 17-year-old Elara Dunlin moves with her mom and dad from Maine to Texas. Elara, a loner, tries to cope with the uprooting. The climate is too hot; she is forced to take a Spanish class with freshmen; and the one friend she makes—Cyrus, whose affable nature and Greek god physique make her heart race—has a jealous cheerleader girlfriend. But Elara stays positive through her setbacks, focusing on things she is good at (calculus, English literature) and things she can make better through her own actions. What really worries her is the young man with the black hair and blue eyes she finds staring at her through the window on her first night in the new house. This same man seems to be stalking her and appearing, quite literally, out of nowhere, first near her alone and then around her and Cyrus when they’re together. Elara and Cyrus, it turns out, share a birthday; when they turn 18, they begin to exhibit supernatural powers. Elara confronts the black-haired stranger. She demands answers, but those answers turn her life—not just her teen existence in Texas, but also her entire personal history—upside down. What secret past do she, Cyrus, and the stranger share? And once it is revealed, what will the future hold? In this series opener, Buckler (Stillness of Time, 2018) writes in an easy, engaging style, foreshadowing the book’s (somewhat expository) turn toward sci-fi but in the meantime building the story upward from the point of view of a normal teen with everyday problems. The romance element serves to ground Elara in readers’ estimation while life lessons are worked unobtrusively into the mix. The text is not without its faults: There are distracting glitches like “Unchartered Territory” and the persistent use of “parent’s” as a plural possessive. And Elara, although generally a convincing first-person narrator, sounds less natural when presenting her thoughts as an inner monologue. Nevertheless, the story is lightly paced, and the characters should appeal to YA and New Adult readers, with the players’ revelatory arcs creating anticipation for the sequel.
A solid beginning to a sci-fi series, with the promise of more adventures to come.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62747-122-0
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Gratus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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