Every family has its
oddballs and oral history. In Ori’s uncomfortable extended stepfamily, the
oddball is elderly Grandma Elving, with her endless, repetitive, boring,
detail-ridden stories about the one Christmas she worked at Woolworth’s.
Somewhat to Ori’s surprise, her cousin’s current boyfriend, Lassiter, is
actually interested in Grandma Elving’s stories and wants to study her with a
new memory-enhancing drug for his dissertation. With Ori as Grandma Elving’s
chauffeur and caretaker, the experiment proceeds and Lassiter becomes convinced
he’s on the brink of uncovering a decisive traumatic event in Grandma Elving’s
life. A love story emerges from the past, just as Ori realizes she has fallen
in love with Lassiter.
There’s a mystery
here, of course, and a sweet romance, but the real pleasure lies in the
wonderfully rich, quirky characters. My one quibble is that we used to call
Woolworth’s the Five and Dime, not Five and Ten (and I never worked there), but
maybe that’s a geographic difference.
A Question of Navigation, by Kevin Hearne (Subterranean)
I’ve read enough of
Kevin Hearne’s work to know that his name on the cover guarantees a great read,
often laced with quirky humor. This tale of alien abduction and prisoner
rebellion is no exception. The narrator is physicist Clint, the aliens look
like ultra-perky anime schoolgirls, and Clint’s T-shirt reads DO NOT EAT.
Unlike the thousands of his fellow humans being stored as food for the long
journey back to the alien home planet, Clint and a handful of other specialists
are being kept alive to reveal humanity’s weaknesses in the most entertaining
fashion possible. The survival of Earth seems a lost cause, between the aliens’
paralytic stingers, their complete control of the ship, and their ability to
eavesdrop on any conversation. But put together a physicist, a marine biologist,
a meteorologist, an expert in robotics, and a few equally qualified scientists,
and mayhem is sure to result.
The ending is gloriously satisfying.
I’ve always loved
stories that take place on one fantastically alien world after another, so I
grabbed this book on the dual strengths of its author (Tim Pratt, master of
space drama) and its premise. Every time Zax Delatree falls asleep, he travels to
a different multiverse. Some worlds are eerily similar to his own highly
technological world where he facilitates harmony, but others are devoid of life
or filled with intelligent, carnivorous life, or gigantic gardens or bombed-out
cities. He’s been traveling this way for a few years now, with no idea how or
why. From time to time, he’s acquired companions, one of whom created a
linguistic virus that allows Zax to understand the languages he encounters, and
another, a farmer who can communicate with and control plant life, and yet
another, a crystalline intelligence desperate for new horizons. Quickly Zax shifts
from unwilling (and insomniac) tourist to fugitive. Someone’s on his trail,
able to track him across multiverses, and that someone has just teamed up with
a murderous, shape-shifting fungus.
The story is at once
dramatic, playful, grim, inventive, and just plain fascinating. Zax sometimes
reminds me of Doctor Who or The Flying Dutchman With a Heart of Gold. I
definitely want to keep traveling with him!
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