An entertaining, well-written tale offering intriguing speculations and a heroine of courage and determination.
In this sci-fi novel, an accountant aims to balance the books when a nefarious corporation’s secret experiments leave her with an unusual side effect: time travel.
Reaching for her breakfast cereal, Sara García, 37, finds herself transported back to 1975 and age 12. Before long, she returns to the year 2000, wondering whether she’s going crazy. Things are strained at her Long Island home; she and her husband, Jon, both accountants, haven’t been close since her late-term miscarriage. Another time flash proves that her past can be changed, frightening Sara into seeing her doctor, who explains that she’s been injected with an illegal serum as part of a mind-control experiment. She must go on the run with a special agent—who turns out to be Steve Ranger, Sara’s college boyfriend. He explains how the injections induce time travel; that Domestic Global—her husband’s workplace—is responsible; and that Jon is actually the company’s secret operative. Something seems fishy about Steve, and Sara still doesn’t know whom to trust after he drugs her and Jon arrives to either kidnap or rescue her. Dramatic events and time flashes keep changing the ground under her feet as Sara pieces the truth together. With the threat of time travel–induced irreversible aging, Sara has a dwindling opportunity to flash back and stop Domestic Global once and for all. The opening pages suggest that Sara’s a standard chick-lit heroine obsessed with dieting, but Ayers (The Dead Boy Sings in Heaven, 2018, etc.) is up to something much more original and engaging. Besides the intertwined thriller and sci-fi elements (fairly plausible), Sara learns a great deal about herself and her relationships in trying to change reality, revelations she couldn’t have had without time travel. Her love of books and music adds to her character’s complexity, and unexpected depths are revealed in several well-drawn side characters, even Sara’s cold, critical mother. The pace could be tighter, bogging down about two-thirds through, but it does pick up toward the end, with a satisfaction-filled conclusion. And there’s a touch of magic in Gallo, Sara’s marvelous cat.
An entertaining, well-written tale offering intriguing speculations and a heroine of courage and determination.Pub Date: July 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9970834-5-3
Page Count: 462
Publisher: Night Rain Books
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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