Brisk sci-fi futurism with a feline star and a positive outlook.
In a future America where intelligent, genetically modified animals are a persecuted minority, a talking cat joins a mixed-species, underground resistance movement.
By 2135, science/technology has solved many of humanity’s ills. The human population has leveled at a few billion and nuclear weapons no longer exist. Still, a ruling “Triumvirate” of corporations decides society needs a scapegoat (or scape-dog or -cat or -pig) for any discontent. It settles on “GAB” animals, different types of domestic critters, from mice on up, with Genetically Altered Brain heredity traits. Medical tinkering rendered their species supersmart and even telepathic/telekinetic. But, occupying a literal no man’s land in terms of legal rights, GAB fauna are feared and strictly regulated, with many free-roaming ones cruelly caught and exterminated. Fluffy, a female GAB cat on America’s East Coast, has lived a safe, sheltered, high-rise life with her human dad, a widowed professor. Answering psychic summonses from the animal world, Fluffy departs for adventures that lead her to furry revolutionaries (and their human allies), a Scrooge-like robotics tycoon high in the Triumvirate, bounty hunters, and a clandestine, mountain-bound “Animal U” (with distinctly New Agey overtones), where GAB beasts develop their powers and eat vegetarian fare in love and harmony. A natural disaster provides the means by which Fluffy and friends show their worth. This upbeat sci-fi novel by Myers (Making It, 2017) seems pitched to the YA demographic, despite having no juvenile characters—unless the audience counts cat and dog years. The prose stylings are serviceable enough, and readers will not find anything to threaten their rosy memories of yesteryear’s superficially similar Rats of NIMH trilogy by Robert C. O’Brien and Jane Leslie Conly. But there are some kindred spirits here, praising the animals as morally superior to the Homo sapiens, with their treacheries, drone warcraft, and global warming. The pace moves rapidly, and the length is just about right. Maybe the biggest surprise: a corporate minion surnamed Trump who isn’t particularly evil or outwardly symbolic of a certain real-life, political/capitalist dynasty.
Brisk sci-fi futurism with a feline star and a positive outlook.Pub Date: March 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68433-231-1
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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