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Summary
Summary
With his second foray into mainstream fiction, following the success of Lost Boys, bestselling and award-winning speculative fiction writer Orson Scott Card creates a sublimely quirky, haunting tale--a clever mix of horror and comedy--about a young man who marries the woman of his dreams--only to be drawn into her family's nightmare.
Author Notes
Orson Scott Byron Walley Card, was born in 1951 and studied theater at Brigham Young University. He received his B.A. in 1975 and his M.A. in English in 1981. He wrote plays during that time, including Stone Tables (1973) and the musical, Father, Mother, Mother and Mom (1974).
A Mormon, Scott served a two-year mission in Brazil before starting work as a journalist in Utah. He also designed games at Lucas Film Games, 1989-92. He is best known for his science fiction novels, including the popular Ender series. Well known titles include A Planet Called Treason (1979), Treasure Box (1996), and Heartfire (1998). He has also written the guide called How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990).
His novel Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead, both won Hugo and Nebula awards, making Card the only author to win both prizes in consecutive years. His titles Shadows in Flight, Ruins and Ender's Game made The New York Times Best Seller List. He is also the author of The First Formic War Series, which includes the titles Earth Unaware, Earth Afire, and Earth Awakens.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When naïve computer-nerd and millionaire Quentin Fears meets the woman of his dreams at a posh Washington, D.C., party and then marries her, he thinks his life is complete. But in this low-key horror novel, appearances can't be trusted and people aren't always in control of their actions. Although Madeleine seems quite sophisticated, there are deficits in her memory and her background is vague. She claims a large, well-to-do family but invites no relatives to the wedding. When Quentin finally meets his in-laws at their palatial Upstate New York mansion, they strike him as eccentric, almost as cartoons of real people. The domineering grandmother, whom Madeleine hates, sits in a trance, eyes closed, refusing to speak. There are hints of past child abuseand of the possibility that a young boy may have been murdered. Why do so many of Madeleine's relatives have names identical to those buried in the family cemetery? And why doesn't Madeleine leave any footprints in the snow? Although the story moves toward a powerful climax, its primary pleasures are more subtle: strong character development and complex motivations, a mystery to solve, the discovery of wheels within wheels. It's rare that Card, renowned for his science fiction (see the review of his Children of the Mind, below), switches genres. But when he does, here as in his Lost Boys (1992), there's little lost and a rare pleasure gained. $50,000 ad/promo; author tour; U.K., translation, first serial and dramatic rights: Barbara Bova. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A contemporary tale of the supernatural: fantastic/science- fictioneer Card's second mainstream outing (after Lost Boys, 1992). When Quentin Fears was a young boy, his beloved elder sister Lizzy went joyriding and ended up dead--though Quentin continued to imagine himself talking to her. After making a fortune in computers, Quentin sells out and drifts. Innocent about women, he meets a soulmate, Madeleine Cryer, at a party; perhaps because she reminds him of Lizzy, he falls in love. They marry quickly, fumble their way toward sexual awareness (with Madeleine as innocent as he), then visit Madeleine's family at their rambling upstate New York mansion. Next morning, during an elaborate breakfast, Quentin meets Madeleine's grandmother and assorted weird cousins; then, oddly, Madeleine insists that Quentin open a box that supposedly contains her inheritance. Thoroughly uneasy, Quentin refuses. Madeleine storms off and disappears--leaving no footprints in the snow, Quentin discovers, though he does come upon the graveyard where the cousins he just met are buried! Madeleine, it emerges, never existed: She's a succubus conjured by a witch. The mansion's real owner, Anna Laurent Tyler--grandmother!--lives in a nearby nursing home. Her daughter Rowena is, Quentin suspects, the witch who has set all of this in motion. He talks things over with Lizzy- -a ghost, not his imagination--and decides to confront Rowena. Unfortunately, the witch is actually Roz, Rowena's 11-year-old horror of a daughter; and Roz, having trapped Lizzie's ghost, now has the means to compel Quentin to open the mysterious box. Inside lurks an evil and powerful dragon that Roz thinks she'll control- -once it has absorbed Quentin. Beautifully orchestrated, with above-average characters, but blandly unsurprising and lacking the gritty, discomfiting feel of reality underfoot. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Booklist Review
Card's second departure from science fiction, the genre in which he's a perennial best-seller, is, like the very successful Lost Boys (1992), essentially a ghost story and a better one than its predecessor because Card doesn't weigh it down with Mormon family values preaching. Instead, he inserts a smidgen of his religion by making his protagonist, bachelor millionaire Quentin Fears, a 34-year-old virgin. Actually, Quentin's chastity, credible and sympathetically portrayed, is rather refreshing. Card also makes it the vehicle for subtle satire of the American obsession with sex as well as the Achilles' heel whereby Quentin is bowled over when he meets the mysterious blond stunner Madeleine Cryer at a Washington, D.C., society party. Not the least of Madeleine's attractions for Quentin is her resemblance to his sister, who died when Quentin was 11 and to whom he was devoted. It turns out that Madeleine is not what she seems, or rather, is only seeming, as Quentin discovers after he meets her family in a creepy old Hudson River mansion--a haunted house, perhaps? Yes, but not merely haunted. Many readers will hear echoes of Robert Marasco's superb haunted-house thriller, Burnt Offerings (1973), and of Hitchcock's classic film about romantic obsession, Vertigo, in Card's effort, which, although not as good as either, is enthrallingly entertaining, nevertheless. (Reviewed July 1996)0060176547Ray Olson
Library Journal Review
At age 11, Quentin Fears is devastated by his older sister Lizzy's death. Subsequently, he grows up to be a lonely man, obsessed with memories of Lizzy. He becomes extremely wealthy, yet everything he does centers around Lizzy. He even picks a wife who reminds him of her. Madeleine, the woman with whom he falls in love and marries in a matter of weeks, turns out to be an apparition invented by an evil witch. Once the story turns to Quentin's wife and her family, the plot degenerates into the script of a B-movie, with wild explanations for the comings and goings of ghosts and the mysterious treasure box that Madeleine wants her new husband to open. Card, the author of many highly acclaimed works (e.g., Children of the Mind, Tor, 1996) is more handy with quick and witty dialog than story content. There is not enough humor here it to be funny and not enough horror or fantasy for it to be either. Recommended only for large collections.Shirley Gibson Coleman, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib, Mich. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.