While serving large helpings of unfamiliar vocabulary, this post-apocalyptic novel still delivers a solid coming-of-age...
In the far future, a young descendant of Native Americans embarks on a vision quest to discover his totem.
Little Owl, or Miintikwa, 17, lives along the Wabash River, where the fish are scarce and starvation looms. His people, the Peeyankihšionki, were spared when the fifth world ended long ago. An abandoned town, Waayaahtanonki, lies north and could be recolonized, but the area is considered ghost-ridden; to the south live the Ciipaya, an implacable enemy. Overwhelmingly curious about what lies north, Owl decides to head for Waayaahtanonki on a vision quest. He’s surprised and pleased when childhood friend Red Willow joins him; she’s a skilled hunter and warrior—and increasingly, unsettlingly attractive. A Ciipaya warrior seeking “the Lake Erie talisman” attacks the pair; Willow leaves Owl to escort the Ciipaya back to his territory. Journeying northward, Owl becomes astounded and puzzled by remnants of civilization: bridge pilings, buildings, glass. He decides to find the cove where his people emerged from the fifth world. There, he’s stunned and terrified to behold Mihšipinšiwa, “Underwater Panther,” but the underworld god grants Owl informative visions about how the last age ended. Owl faces several dangers and more revelations before he can return home with the knowledge to save his people. In his debut novel, Cook melds a futuristic post-apocalyptic story with a classic coming-of-age quest tale, adding interest with authentic details from Native American culture, such as herbal healing and arrow-making. Owl and Willow’s young love is fairly standard but warm. Cook depicts the Peeyankihšionki with appreciation for the tribe’s multilayered politics and offers some intriguing future history, though its mechanics remain somewhat murky. As are other elements: why would historical patterns repeat themselves so exactly thousands of years later? Are non–Native Americans simply evil? And the Native American words employed liberally throughout are big stumbling blocks for the reader. They’re long, of uncertain pronunciation, and many look much the same at first glance: Mihši-maalhsa, Myaamionki, Mihšipinšiwa, Mishiginebig, and Meehšimeelwia, for example.
While serving large helpings of unfamiliar vocabulary, this post-apocalyptic novel still delivers a solid coming-of-age adventure.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5174-6554-4
Page Count: 282
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 25, 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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