An entertaining piece of magical realism.
Even with a time machine, undoing the terror attacks of 9/11 turns out to be harder than you’d think, according to this knotty sci-fi drama.
When his research project, a helmet-like gizmo that stimulates wearers’ memories until they seem as vivid as real life, gets defunded, Columbia University medical student Mike Zweistein continues his work, using childhood buddy Sal as a guinea pig. The gadget has an odd quirk, Sal discovers—if you imagine your memories working out differently, the past changes accordingly. The stage is set for Mike and Sal to “remember” picking today’s winning Lotto numbers yesterday, but instead the high-minded Sal insists on using the helmet to forestall 9/11—his firefighter dad died at ground zero—and ropes his saucy sister Cecelia into the mission. Suiting up with twin helmets, the siblings go back nine years to a past in which, alas, no one believes a pair of goofy teens who claim knowledge from the future about an impending terrorist spectacular. Cutting the Gordian knot, they drive south from Long Island with a rifle in the trunk, heading for the Florida flight school where a terrorist cell is plotting mayhem. The result is an epic road trip; the journey stretches out over many three-hour helmet sessions, and the shifting timelines that link Sal and Cecelia’s past, present and future selves become so tangled that Sal gets shrieking headaches just thinking about them. Readers may also get a bit of a throb when contemplating the plot’s many time-travel paradoxes, but Lange embeds them in a resonant story that plays on the emotional power of memory. There is some fairy-tale schmaltz here—disembodied souls keep swooping over Manhattan—but Lange generally writes with a supple, understated prose, and stocks the novel with appealing characters whose reactions are as believable as their situation is contrived.
An entertaining piece of magical realism.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456558222
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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