While portions fall victim to bland violence, this thriller explores a variety of intriguing topics.
A sci-fi novel examines a web developer’s bizarre past and dangerous future.
When readers first meet Jasper Keepnews, he is awakening from a bad dream. Although Jasper later considers the dream “ominous,” his waking life is fairly normal. He is a Seattle-based web developer who enjoys drinking instant coffee and driving his Kawasaki Eliminator motorcycle. Jasper also has diabetes that requires a regular dose of insulin, a routine that his dutiful, bookish wife, Paige, helps him with. One day at work, Jasper’s interest is piqued by something called a Dreamachine. The device, which William S. Burroughs, among others, championed, is essentially a spinning cylinder that flickers. The flickering is meant to sync with users’ alpha waves and give them access to their dreams while they are awake. Jasper decides to build a Dreamachine, but once he tests it, things get strange. Not only is Jasper catapulted back into his terrible dream, but he also sees a woman being murdered in it. When Jasper tells Paige about the experience, she attempts to kill him. And so launches a tale that quickly becomes rife with battles and secret revelations. Readers learn much about Jasper’s past as he embarks on a quest that proves much more action-packed than the creation of a website. Weapons, ranging from guns to shuriken, are incorporated and blood certainly spills. The problem with Dickerson’s (Detour, 2015, etc.) fast-paced plot involves the characterization of Jasper and a woman he later encounters. Rooting for a man with diabetes and an affection for instant coffee is one thing, but Jasper’s true identity makes him just another action star. Not much is done in the text to make him likable or particularly memorable. What gives the book its power is its incorporation of many astute details. Plenty of sci-fi action scenes reference Koga-ryu but how many delve into the relationship of Beat writers and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring? Certain passages wind up making some heady points even if much of the fighting remains mundane. As the death toll mounts, there is still much for readers to learn.
While portions fall victim to bland violence, this thriller explores a variety of intriguing topics.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9851886-5-8
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Kettle of Letters Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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