Standards for Psychic Integration Presents The Journal of Marie Sands

Name: Standards for Psychic Integration Presents The Journal of Marie Sands
Author: Sandra M. W. Bateman
ISBN: 978-1453588789

by Sandra M. W. Bateman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 6, 2011

A lively, suggestive and significant novel about a unique woman seeking to help others.

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A woman puts her unusual psychic talents to use in this debut sci-fi novel.

Marie Sands is a woman who lives her life in two deeply divergent ways: She’s both an average, logical person who goes about her everyday business, and a psychic savant whose endowed faculties allow her to pick up the emotional energies of the people around her. They also let her communicate with the dying—often when they’re incapable of physical speech—and guide them through the sometimes agonizing processes of death. When she encounters National Security Agency operative Ed Ricks on an airplane, however, she’s finally able to confirm her sense that someone, or some institution, has been tracking her. Ricks has sought Sands out in order to secure her involvement in a newly formed government entity called Standards for Psychic Integration, charged with the task of assimilating practicing psychics into the U.S. government’s new system of nationalized medicine. Although Sands is thoroughly hesitant at first, she eventually negotiates the terms of a contract with Ricks and his superior, NSA director Michael Tipper, which will allow her journals to be published as a public resource. More than half the novel consists of these journal entries, which are brought into the story as Tipper reads them himself. They’re also revealed in a metafictional manner, as author Bateman combines her own personal, real-life journals with the fictional world of Marie Sands. The resulting first-person descriptions of life as a psychic are emotionally sophisticated as well as provocative. In a distinctly human manner, they raise a number of questions about social responsibility, empathy and how to come to terms with mortality. It’s written in clean, unpretentious prose throughout (“The world of psychic phenomenon is alive and has more avenues than anyone can imagine”), although the pace does slow at times. Overall, however, Bateman accomplishes this curious, engaging combination of the real and the fictional with nuanced sensitivity, and it makes for a unique read.

A lively, suggestive and significant novel about a unique woman seeking to help others.

Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2011

ISBN: 978-1453588789

Page Count: 362

Publisher: Xlibris

Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.