A quirky, meticulously plotted adventure.
In Forest’s (The Poisoned City, 2016) futuristic middle-grade novel, children with robotic avatars work to stop a power-hungry hacker.
In the 22nd century, humanity has colonized several planets and moons of the solar system. People sleep in pods on Earth while remotely controlling robotic bodies that can look like anyone or anything. The calculations-obsessed Kade Walker, who’s “12.9 years old,” is the official social companion of Princess Tamika Bell of Venus, and they both have their own avatars. The 14-year-old princess’s family has a tarnished reputation because her mother, Azra, is considered a traitor throughout the colonies. Ten years ago, Azra “handed over a high-level clearance code” to the power-hungry Dolores Fremont, who tried to take over human civilization. Kade wants to rehabilitate Tamika’s image, so he hacks into the colonies’ teleportation system; he and Tamika secretly visit Neptune’s moon Triton, where they meet Prince Brend and his royal companion, Naida Snow. Brend throws a party that becomes dangerous when a dragon misbehaves. Then Kade and Tamika learn that Brend, who’s asleep on Earth, isn’t actually controlling his own bot. It turns out that Dolores is free from her stasis imprisonment and making another play for the colonies. In this sci-fi romp, Forest offers a classic dynamic—precocious youngsters outsmarting wicked adults—and intriguing worldbuilding details. Her planet-hopping avatars, as in video games, needn’t be strictly human, so she gives Kade’s claws, wings, and horns, like a gargoyle, while Naida’s is reminiscent of a mermaid. Even stranger, the author establishes that the kids don't have a notion of what death is; Kade “wondered what happened if someone got a very large cut and spilled blood faster than their body could re-make it. Would the person just deflate like a balloon?” It’s an aspect of the kids’ utopian society that Forest doesn’t fully explore. Later, Dolores reveals a dark truth about nonhuman avatars that may fly over the heads of younger audiences, who will enjoy the story’s more saccharine elements; by the end, Kade is no longer Tamika’s “social companion,” but her true friend. Debut artist Rose provides excellent, manga-style black-and-white illustrations.
A quirky, meticulously plotted adventure.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73372-740-2
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Forest Avenue
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2019
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
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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