A winsome tale with a reverence for science and the humanities.
Hadden’s YA fantasy debut features a group of teens who are tasked with saving the world by some of history’s greatest thinkers.
Fourteen-year-old Tyme Newton lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Her father, Benjamin, is president of the town’s vaguely described “mechanical engineering” factory. One day, in her father‘s office, she discovers an old wooden crate containing a first edition of Philosophæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica by her ancestor Isaac Newton. It also astoundingly contains a note, intended for his descendant, which reads, “you have come upon the beginning of a mystery.” The back of the book holds four “time crystals,” each supposedly able to power a trip back in time. Later that night, Tyme considers testing the crystals, but before she does, she remembers her Grandma Isabelle, who died three years before. Outside, a storm interrupts her thoughts, and lightning hits the O’Connells’ house across the street. Afterward, 14-year-old Zina O’Connell searches for her parents, but they seem to have disappeared. While wandering around the property, Zina finds a stone with carvings that read, in part, “To find your parents you will need… / A watch, a bulb, a brush, a kite.” Tyme and her friends Luna Edison, Avia Wright, and Olympia Van Gogh, have these things, but they have no idea of Zina’s plight. In fact, they’re beginning their own time-hopping mission. They soon receive guidance from their relatives Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright, and Vincent Van Gogh, who’ve joined forces in a dimension called Intelligentsia. Only these geniuses’ descendants can stop a cosmic generator from overloading and causing Earth’s doom. Hadden is clearly enamored with all things scientific, and she strives to instill her passion for learning and the arts in her YA readers. The resulting adventure focuses on the heroic teens’ ancestries to kick the plot into high gear, and she adds a suspenseful, four-day countdown until the electricity machine will destroy the world. The author sidesteps the typical fretting over paradoxes when her characters travel back in time, instead allowing the girls to simply have fun—as when Olympia suggests a title for her ancestor’s latest work: “Well, it’s a night sky full of stars. You know, a starry night.” Tyme’s grandfather, Henry, frequently offers complementary notes of wisdom, as when he says, “We cannot live in the future, worrying about what lies ahead, or in the past....We must live now.” Coded ciphers and puzzles add further dimension to the narrative, as the girls must solve them to discover crucial details of their mission. Even famed dictionary compiler Noah Webster makes an appearance. Hadden’s core message, however, is the importance of teamwork and humility; Tyme’s ego—and her penchant for keeping secrets—nearly undoes the group and the mission, and her poor behavior is mirrored by Isaac Newton, offering a lesson for readers of all ages. By the end, everyone on the team has her own Idea Notebook to inspire future adventures in the series.
A winsome tale with a reverence for science and the humanities.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9994812-2-6
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Windjammer Adventure Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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