A rewarding tesseract of a novel that doesn’t release its secrets easily.
A sci-fi debut about a boy who’s deathly afraid of water and the family who helps reconstruct his mind after a tragic accident.
Twelve-year-old Minnesota native Cessini Madden is brilliant, much like his father, Daniel, who’s a critical systems engineer. Unfortunately, the child has a condition called aquagenic urticaria, which makes his flesh break out in hives at the touch of water. He doesn’t make friends easily, but his dad, a widower, invites a woman named Robin and her young daughter, Meg, into their lives. As Daniel works in a data center, he allows the two preteens to develop their own projects in adjacent lab space; there, Cessini works to build a robot named Packet. While doing so, he grows increasingly anxious about the lab’s sprinkler system and finally decides to sabotage it—with traumatic results. Later, the mixed family moves to the beautiful Tasmanian island of Hobart. There, Daniel and Robin commence work at a place called DigiSci, and Cessini forces himself to confront his fear of water as dramatically as possible—by scaling a waterfall. The boy meets a tragic end, but author Wolf keeps the exact details secret throughout his fragmented, challenging narrative. When readers first meet the protagonist, for example, he’s an incomplete mind, experiencing a semblance of life via a computer program and believing himself to be the entity called Packet; it turns out that the boy Cessini has been dead for 10 years. Wolf alternates chapters in which Daniel, Robin, and Meg try to bring their loved one back toward humanity with ones in which Packet remembers Cessini’s life. The author steeps the tale in hard science and history, as when Daniel wants to administer an Enhanced Blackwell Inversion Test—a variation on the Turing Test, which attempts to gauge a machine’s similarity to a human. Often, the prose is loftily concise, as when Cessini says, “I want to be a computer. I need to be a human.” Yet a few scenes, including the data-center accident, drag with the weight of excessive detail. Overall, this uniquely structured story will most appeal to fans of dense, hard science fiction, artificial intelligence, and futurist literature.
A rewarding tesseract of a novel that doesn’t release its secrets easily.Pub Date: March 25, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 326
Publisher: BentStrong Books
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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