An indelible red-planet backdrop enhances an already rugged, tenacious story of a colony’s cadets learning to rely on one...
Part of a Mars terraforming settlement, a teenager has six days to figure out why doctors are repeatedly wiping her peers’ memories—and why she’s retained her own—in this sci-fi debut.
It’s been nearly a year since Lizzy Engram left Earth to join Mars Colony One, helping make the planet habitable. She’s one of numerous cadets working in biomes, which sustain varying atmospheres, providing optimal conditions for plants. Lizzy’s been experiencing déjà vu lately and is a little nervous about tomorrow’s First Expedition, a mission exploring the planet outside of the colony. The following morning, however, fellow cadets are sure First Expedition is still a week away, while Lizzy, it seems, is the only one who remembers yesterday. But there’s more: Lizzy recalls earlier tests, leading her to believe the colony’s doctors have been regularly wiping her memories. And she doesn’t merely have her own memories, but other cadets’ as well, including her best friend, Chloe. Wanting to know why the nefarious physicians are pilfering memories, Lizzy hides and recruits others, proving herself by relaying their private thoughts or pasts. She soon realizes the doctors are using a technique called Revisions, presumably to cover up a truth. But Lizzy’s keeping secrets, too, ranging from the missing cadets that everyone’s forgotten to something even bigger that, if it becomes common knowledge, could result in widespread panic. The story’s setting is ample and extensive, particularly the biomes, each with a color designation and nicknames for its workers (for example, yellow for the Bolos in the Tropical Rainforest Biome). But it’s the characters’ relatable predicaments that truly reinforce the plot. Lizzy, for one, struggles to convince friends to trust her while she doesn’t have much faith in anyone else. Galloway loads his tale with mysterious elements, like why Lizzy’s a hub for stolen memories, and wisely unveils them throughout the novel—instead of saving them all for the last few pages. There’s romance (reliving what was in cadet Noah Hartmann’s mind shows he has, or had, strong feelings for Lizzy) and minimized but sound melodrama (Lizzy keeps that previous tidbit from Chloe, who’s a Noah fan). The ending, meanwhile, satisfies on every level.
An indelible red-planet backdrop enhances an already rugged, tenacious story of a colony’s cadets learning to rely on one another.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9978558-2-1
Page Count: 410
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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