A fun read but one that’s rough around the edges.
In Ewers’ (EVO Uprising, 2015) novel, a woman is stronger than steel, can heal almost instantly, and can leap tall buildings in a single bound, but she’s not sure if she’s a superhero.
The last four years of Sophia Dennison’s life have been hell. After she’s convicted of the murder of her husband, Robert, a former Marine and Iraq War veteran, she’s sentenced to death. She spends four years in prison before she’s executed by lethal injection. However, things don’t go according to plan: not only does Sophia come back to life, she comes back taller and stronger than she was before. Every time she’s hit by a bullet, she becomes more impervious to harm. After she breaks out of prison, FBI agent Mark Armitage is assigned to find out what happened and track Sophia down, but he soon finds himself stymied by a mysterious team of investigators—“Men in Black” who are also working for the government. Ewers alternates scenes of Mark’s angry puzzlement with those of Sophia’s righteous rage as she tries to find out who did this to her and why, as well as who really killed her husband. This makes for a fast-paced novel that sweeps readers along. Although many of Sophia’s superpowers may seem familiar to comic-book fans, Ewers takes enough care with the worldbuilding that it all feels relatively fresh. The author can certainly write a thrilling action scene and injects just the right amount of self-awareness into this superhero narrative (“Glasses pulled the outfit together; she figured if it worked in the comic books, it would work for her”). The only stumbling blocks are the novel’s many grammatical errors, which too frequently bring the flow of the story to a grinding halt: “Before he can finish his sentence, the ground exploded behind him.” Readers may find it very difficult to ignore them, but the story itself remains enjoyable.
A fun read but one that’s rough around the edges.Pub Date: July 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-615-83669-0
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Evo Universe
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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