A solid, earnest entry with richly developed characters and moral themes.
In the second installment of Dabney’s (The Soul Mender, 2016) fantasy series, Riley Dale seems destined to restore stability to increasingly unstable parallel universes.
As the story opens, Riley is relatively safe in her own world after having returned from its parallel version. Each is populated by the other’s moral opposites—good people in one are evil in the other, and vice versa. The history of these universes goes back to the biblical story of Adam and Eve, when a bite of the forbidden fruit split good and evil into separate entities, along with humanity’s soul. Riley is one of the Electa, Eve’s descendants, who’ve been chosen to save the world. She and Gabe, her “Custos” (or protector), cross over again to the other world to liberate her friends—including her opposite, Oz—from the clutches of evil U.S. president Jackson Cain. He’s hoping to destroy Riley’s ring, bequeathed to her by her Electa grandmother, in order to bring about the end of the Electa. Both worlds are on the verge of devastation: Riley’s is threatened by terrorists overtaking America, and the other by an impending world war. In order to save them both, she must hone her mental training and weaponry skills, dodge assassins, and get along with the tougher but less compassionate Oz. Dabney boosts the action in this deftly written second installment, quickly moving the story to Riley’s training with her grandmother’s Custos, Michael Flynn, and swiftly following it with the rescue mission. The tried-and-true good-vs.-evil theme is surprisingly profound here; for example, killing a bad guy in one world means that an innocent person dies in the other, and Riley’s parallel-world ally, Zach Stone, is a serial killer back where she came from. Riley is a resolute protagonist throughout, determined to complete her task despite questioning her own abilities. Her behavior, however, doesn’t always befit her 22 years, such as when she pouts and grumbles when Oz gets more praise than she does. Plenty is left unexplained, but the answers will provide ample material for Dabney’s concluding volume.
A solid, earnest entry with richly developed characters and moral themes.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9977958-1-3
Page Count: 338
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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