A wheels-within-wheels yarn that isn’t perfect but sure takes readers for a spin.
In Smith’s (Reality Alternatives, 2016, etc.) sci-fi tale, an experiment opens portals to alternate universes and three variations of the same young woman struggle in environments warped by climate change.
The opening of this book lays out three permutations of the year 2100, after global warming has damaged Earth. “Universe 1” offers a scorched landscape where young, semiferal Kat Garcia scrounges for sustenance in the ruins with a few other survivors. In the more livable Colorado of “Universe 2,” college student Kaitlin Garcia anticipates a future with her meteorologist boyfriend while researching a remedy for climate change even as superstorms and rising sea levels batter the United States. In a police-state “Universe 3,” elite scientist Katherine Garcia aspires to create a machine that can generate limitless energy while she deals with swarming surveillance robots and pressure to join a government-mandated dating and breeding program. A quantum-energy fluke opens portals between the three realities. Now the triune heroines can not only communicate and assist one another, but also physically visit other universes—along with assorted lovers, persecutors, and pursuers. But the aftereffects of the rifts are starting to make the multiverse come apart at the seams. Although this isn’t a comedy, Smith delivers the sci-fi equivalent of a high-speed slamming-door stage play in the Lend Me a Tenor vein, full of scampering mix-ups, look-alike characters, and quick entrances and exits. As in such productions, things start off sedate but soon accelerate crazily. It’s an understatement to say that it’s tough keeping the characters, causes, and effects straight from universe to universe. Also, the plot relies increasingly on interventions of a sassy, deus ex machina artificial intelligence named Pandora, who learns to transcend universes and pull off godlike deliverance on demand. Despite the threat of Einsteinian, trans-dimensional total destruction, things wrap up a little too neatly. Overall, though, Smith, a physicist, effectively invests the tangled yarn with brio, imagination, and doses of real-life science.
A wheels-within-wheels yarn that isn’t perfect but sure takes readers for a spin.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9861350-6-4
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Quarky Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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