A vague supernatural tale hidden in ruminations on psychic photons.
After her murder, a woman reaches out from another dimension to find a good home for her pets in this debut novel.
An intuitive pharmacist discovers discrepancies at her place of work: the ordering of too many narcotics and the moving of money deceptively. Her corporate bosses are being strong-armed by a cartel, which does not care for her meddling and stages a fatal car crash to get rid of her. Untethered from her corporeal body, the pharmacist is transported to an ethereal dimension of glowing orbs and vibrations, able to read the minds and influence the actions of the living. Her immediate concern is to transfer her orphaned special needs dogs—Penny, Wilbur, Chance, and Jake—and her sometimes-intractable parrot to the home of an elderly woman, an ex–political activist, who needs the companionship as much as the animals. To effect this change, the pharmacist brings closer together a green-haired veterinarian tech and a shelter van driver, who aid the pets. The pair also helps a middle-aged racist confront the abuse that feeds his bigotry. But when the old woman dies, the pharmacist finds she is not done with the living world, as she takes over the body of her pets’ new caretaker at the cost of her powers. Ellerup’s novel is as intangible as the other dimension its protagonist finds herself in. Characters aren’t given names save for the dogs; by the book’s own admission, this is to provide an “immersive experience of using your imagination and personal experience.” This puts the impetus on readers to fill in the blanks, with characters reduced to physical traits or their jobs and settings left vague. Some personality can be gleaned from the tale’s dialogue, which, despite grappling with metaphysical ideas, is natural and affable. The nature of the other dimension and the powers it grants is left largely abstract save for a post hoc lay summary on the theories of physicist Lisa Randall, dark matter, and parallel universes, coming to rest on electromagnetism as the driving force behind the story’s astral projection and precognition. The interpersonal relationships and friendships this mysticism or extrasensory perception facilitates are warm and welcoming even if there’s no solid ground for readers underneath it.
A vague supernatural tale hidden in ruminations on psychic photons.Pub Date: July 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-79230-560-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2019
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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