A noteworthy baddie and a well-defined power give this otherworldly tale distinction.
Two centuries-old lovers capable of occupying others’ bodies stumble on a few people with the same ability, including one who proves menacing, in this supernatural novel.
Peter Ebersole’s pancreatic cancer means he has mere weeks to live, at least in his current body. He and his lover, Miriam, met nearly 700 years ago and can both inhabit, or ride, other people’s bodies. They carefully select hosts with few familial ties, as they’re essentially stealing the individuals’ lives. Sporting fresh, younger host bodies, Peter and Miriam, now the Hoffmans, start anew in Birmingham, Alabama. Though the couple have secured a substantial nest egg, Miriam gets a job at a PR firm. As riders are rare, she’s surprised when she discovers that two others at the firm have the same talent. But while assisting with a fundraising dinner for the growing American Values Party, Miriam and a rider co-worker spot another of their kind. (Riders can identify their own when their “original faces” are reflected in mirrors.) Unfortunately, this particular rider, Anwar, with a significant link to AVP, sees them as well. Since he considers both a threat, he initiates a plan to eliminate them. Brown (A Stone of Hope, 2015, etc.) raises the stakes by clarifying that Peter and Miriam are vulnerable: If the host body dies before the rider jumps to another one, the consequences are fatal. Anwar is an exceptional villain; the backstory reveals he had ridden the body of an infamous historical figure of the 20th century. In the present day, he’s using his AVP association to stir up trouble in the U.S. The author fortifies the narrative by addressing this special ability’s moral implication: Taking another body effectively ends the host’s life. And a rider may choose death over jumping to a person who has children. Abundant dialogue helps the story pop, especially when it’s satirical: After someone notes Miriam’s age is 700, she specifies that she’s “really only” 680.
A noteworthy baddie and a well-defined power give this otherworldly tale distinction.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73257-760-2
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Ingram Spark
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2018
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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