A promising first novel featuring an unlikely hero.
A millennial gets caught up in the ripples of time travel in Houser’s complex sci-fi thriller.
In 2013, Todd Woodside shares a spacious apartment in San Francisco with his boyfriend, Jason. He’s not thrilled with his job as a medical researcher, but it helps to pay the bills. His comfortable life gets turned upside down, however, when, one morning, he wakes up in the body of an 8-year-old boy named Peter Bremer. He quickly realizes that scrawny Peter lives in a trailer with his schizophrenic mother in rural Oregon—and that the year is 1962. Todd’s strange new existence goes from bad to worse when Peter’s father is killed in a traffic accident. Jack Quinn, a local ne’er-do-well ex-convict, eventually marries Peter’s widowed mother. When Todd finally wakes up back in 2013, he hires a private eye to find out if the people he encountered in 1962 actually existed. He discovers that Peter and his mother died in a fire just after Christmas that same year. It turns out that Jack, who also murdered Peter’s best friend, Lloyd, started the fire, and when Todd ends up back in 1962 again, he resolves to kill Jack. However, that’s not as easy to accomplish as he’d hoped. Because of the butterfly effect of time travel, changes that Todd makes to the past could have unexpected consequences. In his debut novel, Houser creates a layered time-travel puzzle. He smartly makes Todd an atypical hero—one who’s spoiled, self-involved, and even a little lazy. As a result, the protagonist is forced to grow as a person when fate thrusts him into the role of Peter’s protector. Thanks to Houser’s effective past-and-present narrative structure, readers will sometimes find Todd’s journeys to be as jarring as he does; however, the author does supply dates at the beginning of each chapter to help orient his audience. As Todd grudgingly embraces his mission to take on Peter’s tormentor, the author presents a bittersweet tale that wraps up with a satisfying conclusion.
A promising first novel featuring an unlikely hero.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64440-961-9
Page Count: 261
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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