A brainy, tragicomic subversion of university life, the universe, and everything.
In Weatherford’s lengthy debut sci-fi novel, a jaded academic must conceal a beautiful alien in the most perilous place possible: a second-rate university.
In an introduction, the author begs pardon from anyone offended by his arch portrayal of American campus values. The real joke is that real-life political correctness, academic dogma and anti-intellectualism have surpassed this fiction’s satire. Its plot is a critical retort to Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, with a lagniappe of the sexy–space-monster movie Species (1995) thrown in. In 2069, America is even more jaded and cynical than it is now. Long Island astronomer John Watters holds a desultory job at a perpetually downsizing New York state university, manning the last vestige of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project and scanning the cosmos for signals from alien life. Stunningly, he receives a mammoth download of information from 2,000 light years away, including instructions on how to build a device to synthesize an alien visitor from encoded data. Members of the mean, shortsighted, Christian-dominated U.S. government (under glad-handing President John Kennedy Cuomo) try to cover up the signal, but a mysterious billionaire with his own selfish agenda makes humanity’s first contact with aliens possible. By chance, only Watters is present when the alien arrives, in the form of a beautiful, 19-year-old blonde woman. The astronomer attempts to shield the Candide-like innocent from all but a few close confidants, passing her off as “Denise Singleton from Arkansas,” his distant cousin, whom he enrolls at his school. The guileless, enigmatic Denise soon faces the campus’s minefield of power plays and manipulations. As Weatherford highlights the pathologies of academia, he also shows Denise skewering sacred cows with lengthy dialogues about human science, history, race, religion, and culture from an innocent, and alien, point of view. In them, she says that the Big Bang is bunk and that quantum physics is more akin to religious faith than reason; she also naïvely compares the Holocaust to the pitiless wars of extermination that Jews waged against one another in the Old Testament. Such dialogues tend to digress from the narrative as a whole. However, Weatherford’s notions are often frighteningly smart; he even veers sideways for a delicious takedown of the 1946 Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life.
A brainy, tragicomic subversion of university life, the universe, and everything.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615949079
Page Count: 634
Publisher: Durham Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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