A poignant parody of media blather, modern romance, and mangled justice, with sci-fi accents.
A novel explores extraterrestrial love in a topsy-turvy world.
In her latest book, Pell (Who’s Your Daddy, Baby?, 2012) graduates from romantic satire to sci-fi (with a healthy dose of romantic satire). Amethyst Adele “Addy” McCrory is a lonely, brilliant, brassy ex–TV reporter with a murder rap and an appointment with an electric chair named Old Sparkey. Prior to the gunplay that landed her behind bars, Addy and a hunky lawyer named Sean Michael O’Malibul had shared “heart-pumping lust, combined with mind-melding intellect.” But all is not right in their world in 2503 “on a planet called Malaprop, strikingly similar to a planet Malapropians would come to know through garbled, distorted radio transmissions as Hearth.” Malaprop is a backward world, full of sideways slogans, a retrograde justice system, tribes at war, and a scarifying history. It is a world, in other words, very much like Earth. There, Addy muses—for roughly 100 pages—on the tangled histories of Malaprop and Hearth (and Hearth’s holy book, an amusingly and disturbingly garbled version of Earth’s own sacred texts called The Word: The Book of Nirvana, a popular recording of which was first performed by “the punkish unfamiliar young apostle Kurt”). As with most histories, alternative histories, or historical satires, details pile up here but characters don’t stick around. Once readers reach the present, roughly halfway through the novel, they learn why Addy has been imprisoned. They are told of Mandy MacBeth, she of the “double chin that collapsed into her neck and could flatten the sex drive of any normal healthy male,” her persecution of Addy, her lust for Sean, and the comeuppance she eventually receives. The novel is enormously fun to read, filled with jokes and wry asides about the recognizable madness of a planet so like Earth. The levels of reality are so tangled here that readers trying to puzzle out just what happens at the end, when Addy may or may not have the chance at a new life, may be mildly frustrated by the deliberate ambiguity of the closing pages. But for Pell, plot was never the point: this is a wide-ranging satire, not a narrowly focused one, and the pleasure of the author’s voice—combined with the bounty of her imagination—makes the moments reading this book feel like time well spent.
A poignant parody of media blather, modern romance, and mangled justice, with sci-fi accents.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61296-731-8
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.
Here, Follett sets the thrillers aside for a long, steady story about building a cathedral in 12th-century England.
Bloodthirsty or adventure-crazed Follett readers will be frustrated, but anyone who has ever been moved by the splendors of a fine church will sink right into this highly detailed but fast-moving historical work—a novel about the people and skills needed to put up an eye-popping cathedral in the very unsettled days just before the ascension of Henry II. The cathedral is the brainchild of Philip, prior of the monastery at Kingsbridge, and Tom, an itinerant master mason. Philip, shrewd and ambitious but genuinely devout, sees it as a sign of divine agreement when his decrepit old cathedral burns on the night that Tom and his starving family show up seeking shelter. Actually, it's Tom's clever stepson Jack who has stepped in to carry out God's will by secretly torching the cathedral attic, but the effect is the same. Tom gets the commission to start the rebuilding—which is what he has wanted to do more than anything in his life. Meanwhile, however, the work is complicated greatly by local politics. There is a loathsome baron and his family who have usurped the local earldom and allied themselves with the powerful, cynical bishop—who is himself sinfully jealous of Philip's cathedral. There are the dispossessed heirs to earldom, a beautiful girl and her bellicose brother, both sworn to root out the usurpers. And there is the mysterious Ellen, Tom's second wife, who witnessed an ancient treachery that haunts the bishop, the priory, and the vile would-be earl. The great work is set back, and Tom is killed in a raid by the rivals. It falls to young Jack to finish the work. Thriller writing turns out to be pretty good training, since Follett's history moves like a fast freight train. Details are plenty, but they support rather than smother.
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1989
ISBN: 0451225244
Page Count: 973
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
BOOK TO SCREEN
The Stand did less well than The Shining, and The Dead Zone will do less well than either—as the King of high horror (Carrie) continues to move away from the grand-gothic strain that once distinguished him from the other purveyors of psychic melodrama. Here he's taken on a political-suspense plot formula that others have done far better, giving it just the merest trappings of deviltry. Johnnie Smith of Cleaves Mills, Maine, is a super-psychic; after a four-year coma, he has woken up to find that he can see the future—all of it except for certain areas he calls the "dead zone." So Johnnie can do great things, like saving a friend from death-by-lightning or reuniting his doctor with long-lost relatives. But Johnnie also can see a horrible presidential candidate on the horizon. He's Mayor Gregory Aromas Stillson of Ridgeway, N.H., and only Johnnie knows that this apparently klutzy candidate is really the devil incarnate—that if Stillson is elected he'll become the new Hitler and plunge the world into atomic horror! What can Johnnie do? All he can do is try to assassinate this Satanic candidate—in a climactic shootout that is recycled and lackluster and not helped by King's clumsy social commentary (". . . it was as American as The Wonderful Worm of Disney"). Johnnie is a faceless hero, and never has King's banal, pulpy writing been so noticeable in its once-through-the-typewriter blather and carelessness. Yes, the King byline will ensure a sizeable turnout, but the word will soon get around that the author of Carrie has this time churned out a ho-hum dud.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1979
ISBN: 0451155750
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1979
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