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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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