One spectacular sci-fi novella dragged down by three tedious ones.
Four semi-intertwined novellas featuring genetically engineered dogs and a troubled family.
Jenna and her brother, Del, live in a future England ravaged by war and environmental disaster. The seaside town they live in, Sapphire, is dominated by illegal greyhound racing. The dogs, called “smartdogs,” are genetically modified with human DNA, facilitating a telepathic link with humans whose brains have been implanted with special chips. Jenna’s and her brother’s lives quickly unravel, though, when their niece, Maree, is kidnapped. This tautly written first novella creates a brilliantly weird world that’s utterly riveting—which makes it especially disappointing when the next one reveals that everything you’ve read was created by a woman named Christy, who lives in present-day England with her brother, Derek. Christy dreamed up that world to escape from her life after her mother abandoned their family and her brother became increasingly violent. When Derek’s girlfriend vanishes, Christie suspects the worst. This story should be fraught, but instead it’s flabby and inert, save for a stomach-turning assault that feels as if it’s only there to shock. The next novella jumps ahead 20 years and is told from the point of view of Alex, who’s acquainted with Derek’s vanished girlfriend. Christy seeks him out to determine what happened to her, but instead the narrative gets bogged down by details of Alex’s life and an unsubtle, tin-eared examination of the racism he’s experienced. The final novella returns to the first’s dystopian future, although readers will likely find it difficult to work up enthusiasm for this now doubly fictional world. Maree is now a young adult with no memory of her family. She’s able to communicate with smartdogs without a neural implant and was raised with other psychic children as part of a scientific program. When she finds out details of her past, she’s left to decide her own fate. The book ends with a baffling and extraneous appendix of short pieces drawn from both fictional universes, which read like writing exercises that were never meant to see the light of day.
One spectacular sci-fi novella dragged down by three tedious ones.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-907069-70-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Titan Books
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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