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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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