A sci-fi mind-stretcher with a strong opening that spirals down confusing pathways.
Via time travel, two siblings are whisked away from an Earth apocalypse in 2016 to a distant-future space station—where they discover they may be the key to saving the world.
In this debut YA novel, high school freshman Emily Clocke and her older brother, Eric— children of a pair of scientists—have unhappily relocated from California to Chicago after their father perished in a lab accident. Her feelings of dislocation are complicated by a science teacher, Ms. Crana, who seems suspiciously attentive to Emily. But a larger crisis looms on the horizon, literally, with the sky changing unnatural colors. Suddenly Eric and Emily are transported from all that they know by Ms. Crana, who claims they are the children of time travelers who lost their memories during an Earth mission. Now the Clocke kids are 500 years in the future at a space station called Caelestis. Earth is a barren rock and its only human descendants are on Caelestis, enhanced physically and mentally by nanotechnology. They call themselves the Remnant and dwell as ultra-logical telepaths and time travelers, troubled by the fact that historical records have been expunged of everything about Earth’s catastrophe. But the Remnant does maintain a quasi-religious “Prophecy” that two visitors will set everything right, and many interpret Emily and Eric as these saviors. As such, the siblings are pretty much allowed to do whatever they want, including maladroit attempts to take “timeships” back to 2016 to see the Earth cataclysm. Can they stop it? Let’s just say the protagonists’ temporal problem-solving would not earn good grades from Doctor Who, as the repeated crisscrossing time zones, snarled cause/effect overlaps, and predestination paradoxes make previous mind-expanding sci-fi material that ventured into such territory (like the films Donnie Darko, 12 Monkeys, and Prime) seem like models of linear storytelling. Mattson’s ambitious time-travel adventure offers an intriguing setup. But the tale ties Möbius strips into pretzels with its plotting. The questions only multiply, as one character says: “I don’t know what any of this means! I don’t know what will happen if I do something differently! Nobody does!” Which may be true, but which leaves a whole lot unexplained by the last page (a sequel is promised). While pitched at a tween to teen readership, adults won’t feel condescended to; it’s pretty puzzling for all ages.
A sci-fi mind-stretcher with a strong opening that spirals down confusing pathways.Pub Date: March 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73203-060-2
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Marley-Goeste
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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