Richard and Robin’s 20th adventure keeps the action high from the opening pages. It’s a bracing tonic for armchair...
When the sleuthing Mariners pitch in to rescue a crew of trapped submariners, they get entangled in a web of deeper skullduggery.
In the East China Sea, adventuring couple Richard and Robin Mariner (Benin Light, 2008, etc.) get a shock when a giant squid attacks their newly acquired submarine Neptune, which they’re monitoring from their mother ship, the nimble and elaborately equipped Poseidon. Their crane successfully raises the vessel, but the maneuver leads to some squabbling among the Mariners’ Chinese crew, whom Richard has given nicknames like Ironwrist, Steadyhand, Straightline and Fatfist. The political situation in the region remains dicey for Westerners. When a typhoon strikes, Poseidon escapes unscathed, but not Neptune. Efforts to save it lead to a man overboard and another close scrape. All of this is a prelude to the main action—the discovery of a crew of trapped submariners aboard the Romeo Huangpu, a rare diesel-powered submarine whose well-publicized mission is to find the fabled treasure ship of Kublai Khan. The vessel disappeared more than 700 years ago while en route to Japan, carrying, so the legend goes, a massive trove of gold. Employing the Neptune and the equipment the Mariners have used to test it, they set about rescuing the sub and its crew. What they discover astounds them and puts a dangerous and politically sensitive spin on their adventure.
Richard and Robin’s 20th adventure keeps the action high from the opening pages. It’s a bracing tonic for armchair commodores.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7278-6743-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
Top-flight fantasy collection based on Gaiman's character The Sandman, developed in a series of graphic novels for DC Comics, as reimagined by a strong group of fantasists. Long-lived comics readers will remember fondly the original "Sandman" from the 1930s and '40s, with his fedora, googly-eyed gas mask and gas gun; Frank McConnell discusses this precursor in his preface while hauling in Joyce, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Jung, and Wallace Stevens to dress up Gaiman's stow-parentage. Inventing his own lore for the character, Gaiman (1990's hilariously naughty Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett) wrote 75 installments of The Sandman before closing shop. Awash with watercolors and supersaturated with acid, The Sandman stories are stories about storytelling, celebrations of the outr‚ imagination. The central character of Gaiman's work evolved into a figure variously known as Dream, or Morpheus, or the Shaper, or the Lord of Dreams and Prince of Stories, and his surreal family is called the Endless, composed of seven siblings named Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. Drawing on Gaiman's inkwell are Clive Barker (frontispiece but no story), Gene Wolfe and Nancy A. Collins, and a number of lesser lights, all in top form. George Alec Effinger invents a long tale inspired by Winsor McCay's classic comic strip "Little Nemo" ("Seven Nights in Slumberland"), while Colin Greenland ("Masquerade and High Water"), Mark Kreighbaum ("The Gate of Gold"), Susanna Clarke ("Stopt-Clock Yard"), and Karen Haber (in the outstanding "A Bone Dry Place," about a suicide crisis center) mainline directly from the ranks of the Endless. Rosettes to all, but especially to John M. Ford's "Chain Home, Low," which ties an onslaught of sleeping sickness to the fate of WW II fighter pilots, and to Will Shetterly's "Splatter," about a fan-convention of serial killers who lead their favorite novelist (famous for his depictions of psychopathic murderers) into the real world of serial-killing. Fancy unleashed on rags of moonlight.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-100833-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
Part of Hoffman's great talent is her wonderful ability to sift some magic into unlikely places, such as a latter-day Levittown (Seventh Heaven, 1990) or a community of divorcÇes in Florida (Turtle Moon, 1992). But in her 11th novel, a tale of love and life in New England, it feels as if the lid flew off the jar of magic—it blinds you with fairy dust. Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters, only 13 months apart, but such opposites in appearance and temperament that they're dubbed ``Day and Night'' by the two old aunts who are raising them. Sally is steady, Gillian is jittery, and each is wary, in her own way, about the frightening pull of love. They've seen the evidence for themselves in the besotted behavior of the women who call on the two aunts for charms and potions to help them with their love lives. The aunts grow herbs, make mysterious brews, and have a houseful of—what else?—black cats. The two girls grow up to flee (in opposite directions) from the aunts, the house, and the Massachusetts town where they've long been shunned by their superstitious schoolmates. What they can't escape is magic, which follows them, sometimes in a particularly malevolent form. And, ultimately, no matter how hard they dodge it, they have to recognize that love always catches up with you. As always, Hoffman's writing has plenty of power. Her best sentences are like incantations—they won't let you get away. But it's just too hard to believe the magic here, maybe because it's not so much practical magic as it is predictable magic, with its crones and bubbling cauldrons and hearts of animals pierced with pins. Sally and Gillian are appealing characters, but, finally, their story seems as murky as one of the aunts' potions—and just as hard to swallow. Too much hocus-pocus, not enough focus. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14055-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
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