A nice addition to the series with all the same strengths as the original.
Miller (Gravity Breaker, 2016, etc.) picks up Tallah Williams’ story in this second installment as she uses and abuses her gravity-controlling power in an attempt to fit in to—or remake—the world she lives in.
As the story opens, 20 years after the events of Gravity Breaker, Tallah is no longer a young teenager alone in the world; she’s a powerful woman who built a new city out of the Florida wilderness for African-American residents. But when Tallah’s childhood friend stabs her, Miller flashes back two decades to show readers how things got to this point. It begins with Tallah living rough, alone, in San José, California, learning the limits of her gravity-controlling powers and experimenting with rendering things invisible by manipulating a thin coating of dust. She carries this dust with her and even names it, which shows just how alone she is. Then she meets Harmony, an older teen who likes drugs, the environment, and having fun. But after Tallah reveals her powers to her, Harmony hatches plans involving career criminals, which drives a wedge into the girls’ friendship. Later, feeling betrayed and aimless, Tallah destroys part of a national park and ends up founding the city of Fort Mose, named after the first free African-American settlement in America. But founding a city comes with its own problems and dangers, leaving Tallah with the same question: where—and how—does she belong? As in Miller’s first book in the series, the protagonist is engaging; she’s flawed and believable while still maintaining a fundamental relatability. Again, the sci-fi elements are grounded in heavy, timely societal issues; here, they involve race and gender, with Tallah as an African-American woman trying to survive in a system that's stacked against her. The time frame occasionally slows down or jumps forward—years of Tallah’s life are covered in a few paragraphs—but the prose is mostly smooth and controlled. The ending promises another installment as well as something that will change the story’s fictional world.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5394-9590-1
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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