Forges a sensational protagonist and an engaging story with plenty of opportunities to evolve.
A programmer learns that the incessant hum in her ears is just one sign of an extraordinary ability in this thriller.
Lilly Hoffnung has made a living and a name for herself as a highly skilled programmer. Though she generally prefers working with established people and deep pockets, she has genuine affection for the company Exousía and its product. But the interactive, artificial intelligence, home management, and security system has a defect: It’s locking people out of their homes. Lilly is unfortunately distracted as she scours the code for a bug. The hum she’s been hearing for the last couple of years is now accompanied by headaches, and she’s shaken by a hum-afflicted colleague’s suicide. One night, when her pain is unbearable, Lilly somehow makes the hum and headaches stop. Soon a man in her dreams, claiming to be a friend, offers to help her through an apparent “transition”—involving her newfound supernatural ability. Lilly isn’t the only one with this particular talent; in fact, she encounters a group invested in studying the phenomenon. What follows is a visit to a secured headquarters for Lilly to get some answers, so long as she can survive one individual’s unforeseen, heinous intention. Schumer’s (SEAL Catch, 2017, etc.) novel is a commendable introduction to the protagonist for a prospective series. Lilly is shrewd, adept, and entangled in diverting romantic subplots. These involve unwanted advances from fellow developer Ted Hendre and interactions with friend Jim Kinard, a potential lover. Despite the steady progress of Lilly’s supernatural discoveries, the shift in the final act is jarring, suddenly introducing a villain and corresponding peril. But there are likewise tantalizing hints of espionage and that Lilly’s ability could be used as a tool or even a weapon, all of which can be expanded in future installments. And Schumer’s writing is sharp, as when the pain of Lilly’s headaches is palpably described: “It focused, narrowed to a fine point, then pierced her temple like an ice pick.”
Forges a sensational protagonist and an engaging story with plenty of opportunities to evolve.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-9769603134
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 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
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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