A sparkling sequence of tales that bends and flips familiar ideas and fantastic visions.
Divergent characters find themselves in startling situations in this debut collection of unconventional sci-fi and fantasy stories.
There is no guiding principle running through these tales save that they all look beyond the world as readers discern it, challenging—as the best speculative fiction does—a number of preconceived notions. Some might think that the relatable would be difficult to discover in a story about a lonely robot raising orphaned dinosaurs or two friends becoming cut off from each other by the untimely, unexpected closing of doors between worlds, but that dismissal would be premature. While each tale asks readers to forget what they know of the cosmos, identity, gender, or the ordinary, that request comes not in order to fill their minds with convoluted new concepts but rather to twist basic facts into inventive shapes. Someone accidentally cursed to be reborn as a rose sheds light on the symbols readers choose for their affections and how they value them. A non–fairy tale about a girl and a monster she once knew gives readers the ability to overturn the scripts of their own lives and realize who they—and their friends—truly are, however they might be judged. A shadow cast from inside a black hole peels away layers of loss and grief. And “How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps,” centered on longing, tells a surprising, touching tale about those who fail to fit in and how they can carve out spaces of their own. There’s a tremendous variety in these stories: long and short, happy and sad, taking twists and turns or running in blazing straight lines. But what they all have in common is a sense of wonder (“The moment I knew I could love this robot was when the robot asked what I would like to be called. ‘Tesla,’ I said, and the blue LED smiley face in the upper corner of the robot’s screen flickered in a shy smile”). There is a strange power in the realms beyond this universe or hidden in plain sight, and Rustad captures it from myriad angles. The circumstances may be bizarre, but the characters are blindingly real, and it’s only through that combination that these pieces can cut so unflinchingly to the heart.
A sparkling sequence of tales that bends and flips familiar ideas and fantastic visions.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-59021-641-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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