A dystopian tale both engaging and conceivable.
In Gariffo’s sci-fi debut, a mysterious agent handles covert, sometimes-lethal jobs for one of the world-dominating corporations in the mid-21st century.
Agent Sliver’s clandestine work has become routine—even when it involves killing. His latest mission from World, Inc., in New Detroit is to shut down terrorists intent on attacking corporations such as Sliver’s employer. Within the last few decades, five supercorporations have saved the world from economic decline and, in the process, seized control from governments. While Sliver readily accepts assignments from his boss, Fellrock, he hopes his target will be Ancarn, CEO of a corporation called Multinational, though the agent is mum on the reason why. But change may be on the horizon. The typically unsentimental Sliver sympathizes with the daughter of targets he’s just eliminated. He takes Kelly aboard his airship but tells no one since she’s an anomaly (her genetics, for one, aren’t registered like everyone else’s). Complicating matters is a new mission that entails a high-profile assassination and someone’s discernible attempt to take out his ship—and Sliver as well. Luckily, the agent has allies, including the ship’s onboard computer he’s affectionately dubbed Franklin, for facing his would-be assassin. Gariffo painstakingly constructs a convincing near-future tale. The book’s highlight is a series of articles on the supercorporations’ gradual takeover (citizens further crippling the U.S. government by not paying income taxes is frighteningly plausible). The protagonist, meanwhile, is increasingly fascinating: Readers eventually learn his backstory with Ancarn and why Sliver habitually injects himself with Serum. Action scenes showcase Gariffo’s penchant for meticulous details: “Sliver swung the chair’s legs up into the face of the individual to his left and then threw the seat into the upper half of the flunky on his right.” Unfortunately, Kelly, the only significant female, is largely unexplored, from the impact of her family’s deaths to adjusting to a corporate-ruled world her parents kept hidden from her.
A dystopian tale both engaging and conceivable.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-983349-60-7
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2018
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
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
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