A semiconclusive entry in a lightweight science-minded series.
In Smith’s (A Jack in the Dark, 2018, etc.) latest sci-fi series installment, physics professor Madison Martin’s former student may be using her reality-bending technique for large-scale vandalism.
In the last book in this series, Boulder, Colorado–based college instructor Martin grappled with villains who misused her breakthrough technique, “q-lapsing.” It involves using mind power, adrenaline, and quantum physics to alter reality to a chosen outcome—such as disintegrating the door to a bank vault. Martin’s expertise resulted in her becoming a special consultant to the police and FBI, tentatively training lawmen to use her process for a range of tasks. Now she, as the “Quantum Cop,” must assist them again following another outbreak of mischief—this time involving the eradication of a mining ghost town and the dissolution of a highway. The apparent perpetrator is Luke Bacalli, Martin’s foremost ex-student-gone-bad, whom she thought she’d killed in a quantum duel. Despite the fact that the material universe is at risk, Smith’s tone remains chirpy and playful, and in side plots, Martin’s long-standing love affair with faculty colleague Andro Rivas cools and her attraction to police officer Ben Willis heats up. The motivation for the large-scale destruction isn’t explained, and the behavior of the villains, who alternate between being maniacal and panicked, seems inconsistent, but these questions may be addressed in a future installment. Q-lapsing, in narrative terms, feels very much like spellcasting despite repeated assertions that it’s all based in science (“I concentrated and collapsed the wavefunction, instantiating the reality in which I’d followed this particular improbability to its source”). As is her habit, Smith, a real-life physicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, concludes this flighty tale with a lucid nonfiction physics essay; this time around, it’s about neutrinos even though they only have a small cameo in the text.
A semiconclusive entry in a lightweight science-minded series.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9973131-9-2
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Quarky Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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
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