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MRS. VARGAS AND THE DEAD NATURALIST

Name: MRS. VARGAS AND THE DEAD NATURALIST
Author: Kathleen Alcala
ISBN: 0-934971-26-9

by Kathleen Alcala ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1992

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Fantasies abound in this first story collection from Seattle- based Alcal†, who moves as subtly across the border between the US and Mexico as between the real and surreal, probing desperate lives of women under duress, and their dubious refuge of dreams. Fourteen tales combine to produce a distinctive and consistent worldview, in which women of all ages and a few men are caught in the webs of their own imaginings as they cope with the vagaries of an often drab existence. The title story brings an old Anglo to the door of Mrs. Vargas, who is expecting a famous naturalist as her guest while he studies a local bird, said to be a harbinger of death. Dying on the moment of his arrival, his identity is opened to doubt when the real scientist arrives and Mrs. Vargas is left to contend with a ghost seeking a portfolio of the dead man's bird drawings. Birds figure prominently elsewhere, as in ``The Canary Singer''—which features a woman with the remarkable ability to sing like a bird, a gift that takes her far from a humble family origin holding the secret of her gift—or ``Flora's Complaint,'' in which the arrival of a black swan on the lawn of Flora's southern California home gives her an outlet for her countless dissatisfactions, but the bond between them proves stronger than death, so she's condemned to remain in the bird's custody in the afterlife. Dream worlds full of roses and the presence of dead relatives intermingle with an archbishop's rich fantasy life provided by his ghostwriter, part of a succession of images generating a lush magical reality of considerable strength. An intensely imaginative, often compelling debut.

Pub Date: July 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-934971-26-9

Page Count: -

Publisher: Calyx Publishing

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FLOWER IN THE SKULL
by Kathleen Alcala

- BOOK REVIEW
SPIRITS OF THE ORDINARY
by Kathleen Alcala

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THE POET

by Michael Connelly ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 1996

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Connelly takes a break from his Harry Bosch police novels (The Last Coyote, p. 328, etc.) for something even more intense: a reporter's single-minded pursuit of the serial killer who murdered his twin. Even his buddies in the Denver PD thought Sean McEvoy's shooting in the backseat of his car looked like a classic cop suicide, right clown to the motive: his despondency over his failure to clear the murder of a University of Denver student. But as Sean's twin brother, Jack, of the Rocky Mountain News, notices tiny clues that marked Sean's death as murder, his suspicions about the dying message Sean scrawled inside his fogged windshield—"Out of space. Out of time"—alert him to a series of eerily similar killings stretching from Sarasota to Albuquerque. The pattern, Jack realizes, involves two sets of murders: a series of sex killings of children, and then the executions (duly camouflaged as suicides) of the investigating police officers. Armed with what he's dug up, Jack heads off to Washington, to the Law Enforcement Foundation and the FBI. The real fireworks begin as Jack trades his official silence for an inside role in the investigation, only to find himself shut out of both the case and the story. From then on in, Jack, falling hard for Rachel Walling, the FBI agent in charge of the case, rides his Bureau connections like a bucking bronco—even as one William Gladden, a pedophile picked up on a low-level charge in Santa Monica, schemes to make bail before the police can run his prints through the national computer, then waits with sick patience for his chance at his next victim. The long-awaited confrontation between Jack and Gladden comes at an LA video store; but even afterward, Jack's left with devastating questions about the case. Connelly wrings suspense out of every possible aspect of Jack's obsessive hunt for his brother's killer. Prepare to be played like a violin.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1996

ISBN: 0-316-15398-2

Page Count: 440

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NIGHTSHADE
by Michael Connelly

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WAITING
by Michael Connelly

- BOOK REVIEW
RESURRECTION WALK
by Michael Connelly

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ORYX AND CRAKE

From the MaddAddam series , Vol. 1

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2003

A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Russian revolutionary...

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Environmental unconcern, genetic engineering, and bioterrorism have created the hollowed-out, haunted future world of Atwood’s ingenious and disturbing 11th novel, bearing several resemblances to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).

Protagonist Jimmy, a.k.a. “Snowman,” is perhaps the only living “remnant” (i.e., human unaltered by science) in a devastated lunar landscape where he lives by his remaining wits, scavenges for flotsam surviving from past civilizations, dodges man-eating mutant predators, and remembers. In an equally dark parallel narrative, Atwood traces Jimmy’s personal history, beginning with a bonfire in which diseased livestock are incinerated, observed by five-year-old Jimmy and his father, a “genographer” employed by, first, OrganInc Farms, then, the sinister Helthwyzer Corporation. One staggering invention follows another, as Jimmy mourns the departure of his mother (a former microbiologist who clearly foresaw the Armageddon her colleagues were building), goes through intensive schooling with his brilliant best friend Glenn (who renames himself Crake), and enjoys such lurid titillations as computer games that simulate catastrophe and global conflict (e.g., “Extinctathon,” “Kwiktime Osama”) and Web sites featuring popular atrocities (e.g., “hedsoff.com”). Surfing a kiddie-porn site, Jimmy encounters the poignant figure of Oryx, a Southeast Asian girl apprenticed (i.e., sold) to a con-man, then a sex-seller (in sequences as scary and revolting as anything in contemporary fiction). Oryx will inhabit Jimmy’s imagination forever, as will the perverse genius Crake, who rises from the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute to a position of literally awesome power at the RejoovenEsense Compound, where he works on a formula for immortality, creates artificial humans (the “Children of Crake”), and helps produce the virus that’s pirated and used to start a plague that effectively decimates the world’s population. And Atwood (The Blind Assassin, 2000, etc.) brings it all together in a stunning surprise climax.

A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Russian revolutionary Zamyatin’s We. Atwood has surpassed herself.