Entertaining, femalecentric, escapist reading for poolside.
In this sci-fi novel, a revolutionary new technology has unforeseen consequences as a young scientist creates a “quantum” computer that endows her with unusually good luck.
To earn her master’s degree, youthful Ella Hote, a researcher in the U.S. heartland, has built a suitcase-sized quantum computer. This heavy-duty calculating machine features microchips that, at the subatomic level, can occupy exponential states of being, not just the usual ones or zeroes. But there seems to be a macrocosmic side effect to the quantum components of the computer. When it is switched on and made to calculate, incidents befall Ella that seem especially well-timed and fortuitous—fluky hookups with handsome guys, a job offer, a casino jackpot, and a rainstorm ending a drought. But Ella notices that with each windfall for her comes bad fortune for somebody else—even injury and death at the casino (At one point, she reflects: “I might have been sort of lucky. It seems like people near me might be sort of unlucky”). Ella eventually theorizes that “luck” in the universe must be balanced out like any other force and that a q-computer in the wrong hands could spell disaster. And straightaway, hers gets stolen. If you use Carl Sagan as the benchmark of a scientist-turned–sci-fi author, then real-life physicist Smith (Reality Alternatives, 2016, etc.) might rate somewhat at the light-element end of the periodic table. Still, her novels and series that riff on quantum mechanics and Erwin Schrödinger strangeness are fun little mind tricks and thought experiments, part George Gamow at his more fanciful crossed with chick lit. Smith’s latest offering might be compared to a Rod Serling teleplay except it isn’t even that edgy. A good chunk of the seriocomic narrative takes place in gambling and card-playing milieus (there is only one passage of scientific jargon, plus a short nonfiction essay on principles of quantum computing at the end). But the material is more on the easygoing side of the spectrum rather than a thriller. The wrap-up suggests a variation on It’s a Wonderful Life with quantum mechanics replacing Clarence the angel.
Entertaining, femalecentric, escapist reading for poolside.Pub Date: June 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9973131-4-7
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Quarky Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.
A very funny novel about the survivor of a childhood trauma.
At 29, Eleanor Oliphant has built an utterly solitary life that almost works. During the week, she toils in an office—don’t inquire further; in almost eight years no one has—and from Friday to Monday she makes the time go by with pizza and booze. Enlivening this spare existence is a constant inner monologue that is cranky, hilarious, deadpan, and irresistible. Eleanor Oliphant has something to say about everything. Riding the train, she comments on the automated announcements: “I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon.” Eleanor herself might as well be from Ulan Bator—she’s never had a manicure or a haircut, worn high heels, had anyone visit her apartment, or even had a friend. After a mysterious event in her childhood that left half her face badly scarred, she was raised in foster care, spent her college years in an abusive relationship, and is now, as the title states, perfectly fine. Her extreme social awkwardness has made her the butt of nasty jokes among her colleagues, which don’t seem to bother her much, though one notices she is stockpiling painkillers and becoming increasingly obsessed with an unrealistic crush on a local musician. Eleanor’s life begins to change when Raymond, a goofy guy from the IT department, takes her for a potential friend, not a freak of nature. As if he were luring a feral animal from its hiding place with a bit of cheese, he gradually brings Eleanor out of her shell. Then it turns out that shell was serving a purpose.
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2068-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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