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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
