An innovative time-travel tale in which the main characters don’t actually visit the past or the future.
Eight elite brothers and sisters try to survive the regular upheavals caused by reckless time traveling.
Huston’s debut novel, starting a new sci-fi series (planned as 10 books), delivers a clever time-travel conceit. It involves the consequences of time travel (immortalized in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”): reality in the “present” shifts due to temporal meddling in the past. After time travel becomes feasible, the U.S. has a new metropolis—Shawneetown, Illinois, evidently displacing Chicago, created through engineering by entrepreneurial voyagers. But for the Vann family of Shawneetown, life means periodic, bewildering paradigm shifts, as new waves of reality hit one after another, sending the clan scrambling to dimensional “Safe Houses.” The Vanns never know whether former careers, relationships, or even their personalities still exist. At least they are semi-protected; most people are oblivious “Bystanders,” erased or created whenever another human-caused Timestorm arrives. To the time-travel insiders, Bystanders are as inconsequential as Harry Potter’s muggles. The narrative (which is epistolary, journal entries via some form of recording device) reflects the point of view of young, uncertain Dexter Vann, an aspiring engineer warned not to count on finishing college by oldest brother Amos (an elite in the enigmatic time-travel governing body). Every few chapters, a new reality (“Season”) dawns. Some Seasons are harsh and weird; others are pleasant. But with Time Changes happening 250 times already, Dexter suffers a bad case of existential dread, turning very personal when he emerges into a reality in which his “Alternate Self” possessed a girlfriend he has never actually met. The tale is somewhat hobbled plotwise by its premise. The challenge here is advancing a storyline that resets itself on a regular basis. Huston manages some momentum, partially thanks to the recurring menace of a vengeful time “Void Pirate” but mainly through reliable inventiveness. There’s a newspaper—actually an “Oldspaper”—for the time-travel clique; time-related neuroses that surface to varying degrees in Dexter’s older and younger siblings (a glossary is included); and the protagonist’s own inconsistent voice. It’s difficult enough to find an identity as a youth; it’s much harder with reality routinely rewritten. Underlying the wit, wonder, and surprises is a theme of family bonds holding characters together despite the whole Chronoverse going crazy. The material is attuned to both YA and adult sensibilities.
An innovative time-travel tale in which the main characters don’t actually visit the past or the future.Pub Date: March 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-946090-00-3
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Chronoversal Export
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2017
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
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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