Innovative sci-fi with plenty of substance, even if it’s weighed down by some confusing sequences.
In Greenleaf’s sci-fi actioner debut, a monk with special powers heads to outer space to save a colony from destruction.
Eamon, an Akuru monk, lives in a temple sealed off from the rest of the world by a security barrier. He is a gifted healer whose empathic abilities enable him to connect to other people’s minds and manipulate their memories. He’s the best at what he does, but being cloistered on a mountaintop his whole life has made him long to see other worlds. Excitement arrives in the form of agent Rachel Blue, an assassin who was presumed dead but showed up alive on a space station. Hostile and traumatized, Rachel needs Eamon’s help, but there’s some concern that attempts to heal her may cause damage to Eamon’s genetically modified nervous system. Additionally, attacks on outer space birthing centers have been decimating the number of empaths, and the temple’s future is now in doubt. Hoping to put a stop to the hostilities and to help Rachel, Eamon decides to heal her. The process has unintended consequences, however, and Eamon soon realizes that Rachel is now determined to destroy an enemy as well as an entire colony of innocent souls. Stripped of his healing duties and facing consequences for the botched healing, Eamon escapes the temple and heads to the Europa moon to prevent Rachel from carrying out her murderous objective. Greenleaf handily succeeds in creating a new universe. A few familiar things on Earth, such as mountaintop Sherpas, live in a world wholly different from our own, with futuristic takes on genetic engineering providing support for an action plot that rarely slows down. The novel has a wealth of terminology, acronyms, and abbreviations that can test the memory, and the narrative is at times somewhat confusing and hard to follow. Still, Greenleaf’s novel is ambitious and daring. The worlds on display are unique, and the journeys into other people’s minds are as interesting as any external occurrences. The overall humanness of Eamon, and even Rachel, is what eventually grounds the wild narrative’s chaos.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9848321-4-9
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Freeman Park Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 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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