Alien shenanigans delivered with a sense of Disney Channel mischief rather than Scully/Mulder gloom.
In this debut YA novel, two teenage siblings host a foreign exchange student who plunges them into a mystery involving aliens and Illinois crop circles.
In the greater Chicago area, the household of teen siblings Natalie and Chase Dailey is hosting a British foreign exchange student named Fletcher Jain. Clever Chase suspects there’s more to the newcomer than meets the eye when he spots a mystery woman giving Fletch a secret envelope at the airport. When a crop circle and a mutilated cow come to light in the rural countryside, Fletch—actually an affiliate of an international flying-saucer investigation network called UFORB—is uncommonly interested and gets the eager Chase and the somewhat skeptical Natalie to join him for their own personal sleuthing. In a parallel plotline, somewhat confusing but eventually merging with the Daileys’ part of the narrative, professor David Wu has written a book featuring the thesis that advanced ancient alien explorers landed in the British Isles, interbred with humans, and gave rise to legends of wonder-working “Druids.” He is also here, in Deadwood, Illinois, prompted by the mysterious death of a reader who promised to reveal to Wu a whole list of humans next scheduled to be “abducted” by UFOs, thus enabling the professor to catch space intruders in the act. But Wu’s meddling gets him and his own teenage daughter, Janelle, caught up in considerable underhanded malice among Deadwood elites. With moon boots firmly on YA soil, Murphy takes a largely light, comedic approach to this SF conspiracy plot. The vibe is not unlike the roller-coaster thrills of The 39 Clues series, though written for a slightly more elevated age range and with an actual body count. There are also edutainment bits about ancient code writing (“steganography”), how hoaxers create crop circles using simple planks and rope, and pop-culture shoutouts to the Star Wars series, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and Harry Potter. As opposed to The X-Files, starring the serious Dana Scully/Fox Mulder team, a natural precursor, this tale is breezy and angst-free, with cool illustrations by Catling (A Pirate Christmas, 2018, etc.) setting a lively ambiance.
Alien shenanigans delivered with a sense of Disney Channel mischief rather than Scully/Mulder gloom.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-08-781100-0
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Cooper Murphy
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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