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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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