A big-hearted but unfocused adventure tale.
A Christian parable with an action-adventure twist.
The latest from Hoyer (In the Absence of Orders, 2007, etc.) takes place in a secluded valley called Thanoton, where the weather is permanently cloudy and the residents are taught that “the only thing outside the valley is a wasteland with creatures ready to devour anyone that enters.” Some residents follow the teachings of an ancient group known as the Children of Light, worshipping in secret to avoid punishment by Thanoton’s despotic king. Aided by a complex web of covert organizations and savvy double (and triple) agents, three teenagers set out to restore the valley by studying and following a text called The Book of Prophesies, after they hear messages from a mysterious Whisperer. The plot’s Christian underpinnings are plain; for example, one leader reminds his fellows: “We are here for the people, to set them free—free to worship the Light of the Word. Our highest purpose is to glorify Him.” Readers of all religious persuasions, however, may enjoy the book’s classic action-adventure elements; espionage, secret messages and daring escapes abound. All that duplicity, however, eventually becomes hard to follow. New characters keep popping into the story, and their abundant abilities to deceive one another and operate in secret under an oppressive regime increasingly push the limits of plausibility. Even more confusingly, the original main characters are largely absent from the book’s second and third acts, making the narrative feel disjointed and sometimes directionless. Still, Hoyer draws some compelling shades of gray out of what could have been a black-and-white tale of good versus evil, giving even the heroic characters space for flaws and keeping readers guessing about their true motivations. Reflecting on his own shortcomings, for example, one character thinks of the Whisperer: “He chose to use people to accomplish His will….He uses even their failures to accomplish His purpose.” Although they are couched in Christian terms, this novel’s nuanced values will likely resonate with readers of any stripe.
A big-hearted but unfocused adventure tale.Pub Date: April 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692023747
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Christian Publishing House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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