Author: Brian Rowe
Publisher: ?
Rating: worthy
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
Errata (note that - This novel is such a doozy that I can't be sure these are errors!)
p18 "…staircase, still in tact…" Intact?
p31 "…sat on a large thrown…" Throne?
p41 "Gravity did not defy Raymond Green." seems like it should be just the opposite: he wanted to fly and gravity did defy his wish.
This is one weird novel. It's a mash-up of The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland. Zippy is gay, and her father Raymond Green is a religious fundamentalist who decides the only 'cure' for her is to send her to Moral Intervention camp (with the emphasis on camp, no doubt!) for the summer. Zippy has other plans, however, and they're made up on the spur of the moment as she surreptitiously empties out a fellow traveler's suitcase and inserts herself inside it, thereby getting on a plane to Seattle, where her online girlfriend lives, instead of heading down to Memphis where the camp is. Her father is completely bewildered by her amazing disappearance, but he soon figures it out.
Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately, I guess - the plane crashes, and Zippy and another guy (and a little dog, too) are the only survivors. Zippy names the dog Judy, and the three of them set out to find out what happened to the other passengers. Some thirty of them are dead on the plane, but there were many others who seem to have disappeared. They eventually find their way to a small town. Meanwhile Raymond heads out to his car in the airport parking lot and encounters the rapture, but surprisingly (to him), he isn’t taken! The next thing that happens is that a T-rex comes stalking through the airport...! The rest of the novel consists of his attempts to catch up to his wayward daughter, and her attempt to get to Seattle to meet her online friend Mira.
In the final analysis, frankly, I'm not quite sure what to say about this novel. I'm not at all convinced that mixing a gay love story with what's clearly a fairy tale is a wise decision! I did finished the novel, so it was readable by my standards, but I didn’t feel any compulsion growing, during that reading, to seek out other works by this author. Having said that, I wasn't turned off or nauseated by the story either; I was just not falling in love with it. It was clearly a wild romp, not at all intended to be taken seriously, so I can’t fault it for its improbabilities, and by that standard I should therefore rate it worthy, which is what I am going to do, with the caveat that it's never a positive sign when you have to think for a bit before you find a reason to rate a novel as a worthy read!
If you like silly, including highly improbable and silly happy endings, then this is one for you. If you like thoroughly goofy, then this is for you. If you like Wizard of Oz combined with the rapture, combined with dinosaurs acting completely out of character, then this is for you. And talking of out of character, Zippy's father was probably the most improbable character of all, especially at the end.
If you like dinosaurs portrayed realistically (or as realistically as we can gage their behavior sixty-four million years after the fact), then this will likely stick in your craw. Can we gage their behavior? That's the 64 million-year question isn't it? But I’d be willing to bet that contrary to popular portrayal in TV and movies, your average dinosaurs would be unlikely to chase and attack a motor vehicle. They would likely be scared of it, because it’s unlike anything in their world, just as they would be unlikely to consider humans to be a primary food source the instant we meet, because we’re unlike anything in their world. This knee-jerk portrayal of them as always being desperately hungry for human flesh and having no other interests whatsoever is nonsense. The smell and noise of a motor vehicle would repulse them, and I’d bet a dinosaur wouldn’t attack a vehicle out of the blue unless the dino was a mother who deemed it a threat to her brood.
On the topic of religion, to suggest that the supreme being would miss some people during the rapture if he couldn’t directly see them is absurd! A god really isn’t a god when it’s so blind and so thoroughly anthropomorphized, yet the religious do this with their gods routinely; it's another religious foible that provides me with endless amusement. In the final analysis, though, such a god is no more absurd than the Wizard of Oz, or Alice in Wonderland, is it? It’s no different than a wooden boy coming to life or a guy spinning gold from straw. There is nothing to religion other than what each individual creates out of it for themselves, so I had no problem with this since I consider gods just a much a fairy tale as any other fairy tale topic. On that basis, the story made "sense"! So go read it and see what you think. It’s a short, easy read and has a nice dollop of humor here and there. Not a bad way to idle away a couple of hours and a lot more rewarding than going to church!
