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THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT

ESSAYS ON FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION

If you want evidence that people are thinking and writing about science fiction these days with sophistication and good sense, you need go no further than this volume. But if you want evidence that these qualities have not necessarily percolated through the science-fiction readership, you also need look no further than to see how it's edited. Assembled and very solemnly introduced by Susan Wood of the University of British Columbia, the material itself ranges from the sublime to the superfluous. The 24 selections, arranged in five not-very-convincing categories, include award-acceptance speeches, book reviews, introductions to reprints, and both substantial and slender contributions to science-fiction journals and symposiums. At their best they are eloquent examples of an unashamed humanism rarely encountered today. Fantasy and science fiction, Le Guin has long been telling us, are really about ourselves. Fantasy at its best reminds us all "that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived." Science fiction with all its incongruities is "a broken mirror" each of whose fragments "is capable of reflecting, for a moment, the left eye and nose of the reader, and also the farthest stars shining in the depths of the remotest galaxy." But the nearest Susan Wood can come in six introductions, is the observation that the writer's duty pace Le Guin is to express "a clear moral vision in the most artistically satisfying way possible." Wood's choices are often exasperating too; she gives us much more of Le Guin the priggish deplorer of commercialism and masscult than of Le Guin the daring and unsentimental romantic. The author is also rather ill-served by the repetitiveness of the selection (the imaginary "Belch the Barbarian" of one paper turns up as "Barf the Barbarian" in another). Just how much better Wood might have done can be surmised from Jeff Levin's invaluable Le Guin bibliography, reprinted here as an appendix.

Pub Date: April 24, 1979

ISBN: 0060924128

Page Count: 250

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1979

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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MAGIC HOUR

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

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