A fast-paced adventure involving dinosaurs that should appeal to creationists.
In this debut YA novel, a time traveler discovers that the Ice Age occurred several thousand years ago, matching the biblical account of Creation.
Bill Abrams is a scientist who aims to prove the Earth’s true age and development via his invention, a time machine he dubs the Light Assimilator, propelled by the sun’s ultraviolet rays. He questions the current scientific consensus that the Earth is billions of years old: “I am beginning to believe that man, dinosaurs, and even trilobites lived together on this planet surrounded by a tropical haven until something catastrophic happened.” Abrams travels to 2351 B.C.E. and discovers that the Earth is one giant continent, Saudi Arabia is a massive jungle, and a solid band of water is “located at the edge of outer space where the ozone layer is today.” In between some exploits and narrow escapes, Abrams documents his findings—including dinosaurs and Noah’s Ark. Sadly, all his evidence is lost when Halley’s Comet disrupts the water belt, causing a great flood. Now convinced that Genesis is true, Abrams decides: “I must also believe in the remainder of the Scriptures,” including the New Testament, and is converted to Christianity. Though he returns to the present, the government gets involved, suppressing this new knowledge—for now. In his novel, Leonard offers a fast-moving, Jules Verne–like story with dangers, escapes, and dinosaurs. It’s backed by science-ish explanations; for example, ultraviolet rays act like a magnet somehow to propel the craft. This detail is perplexing, though—why isn’t the time machine just drawn straight into the sun? Even more controversial, for the science-minded, is the tale’s evidence for Abrams’ theories—including that dinosaurs, trilobites, and humans lived together on Earth—for which it is easy to find, for those who care to look on the internet, well-reasoned debunking. (A short creationist bibliography is included.) Leonard also repeatedly identifies Abrams as an archaeologist, though he performs climate science and wrote his thesis on radiation propulsion. The author’s insistence that early humans were all light-skinned, together with Abrams’ conversion to Christianity, may also bother some readers.
A fast-paced adventure involving dinosaurs that should appeal to creationists.Pub Date: May 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4908-7300-8
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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