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KARMA'S ENVOY

A promising first novel featuring an unlikely hero.

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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

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MAGIC HOUR

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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