Author: Steven Gould
Publisher: Tor
Rating: WORTHY!
I reviewed Jumper, the first in this trilogy, here.
I reviewed Impulse the second sequel to Jumper here.
This is yet another one of Gould's which has a title competing for attention. There are at least four other books with the same title! I've read the two Gould novels which bracket this one and thoroughly enjoyed both so I expected no problems with this one, was looking forward to starting it. It did not disappoint, although there are bits of it which were somewhat testing of my patience! I started out thinking this one would be all Millie, but it's split between her and David in alternating sections. I loved the way Gould started this one, harking back with the first sentence to the first novel, but then taking that reference in a completely different direction before throwing in a twist a bit later!
It's ten years on, and David is working part time for Brian Cox, the NSA guy he had a run-in with in Jumper (which for some reason I keep thinking is titled "Jumpers" but it's not!) and has since befriended. In this sequel there are still no Paladins, which was a pure invention of the movie version, and which I've no come to think of an an aberration and not part of the Jumper world at all.
Millie is on the warpath because she wants to start a family. David doesn't because, well, JUMPING! Millie discovers that she can also jump (when she's highly motivated to do so), and it's just as well: David is kidnapped! He's drugged surreptitiously and taken captive by a mysterious group of people who tranquilize him so he can't think coherently enough to jump anywhere. They then keep him confined in a room, manacled to the wall. In the novels, he's unable to jump put of manacles. So now we have two people in the world who are jumpers. Quite a difference from the movie where there were many more of them. note also that Griffin makes no appearance in these novels, not in this one, not in Jumper, and not in Impulse.
While he's in captivity, before he recovers from being drugged, David's captors insert something under his skin that when triggered, makes him feel so bad when that he vomits and has a bowel movement. Yuck! Then they make him clean it up! Double yuck! I think I would have striven to direct all my bodily effluents right by the door where they have to come in and out, and never clean it up. But of course they have the stick, and it's a large and very effective one. David begins to cooperate but is very angered by it. One thing which became clear (other than that this group intends to use this control over him so that he will do whatever it is they want): David hates this woman who is in charge, but my guess was that it would be Millie who takes her out, and I was not exactly right but not far wrong.
David does get into it with Hyacinth, the woman who is supervising his imprisonment, but he comes off worst, and wakes up feeling as battered and bruised as he actually is! I guess his jumping was no match for her karate, but she does have the hots for him and wants to jump his bones! Now that fight - the battle, not the sex - would be worth seeing in a movie. I had a real problem with this part of the novel because David is quite attracted to Hyacinth Pope, and offers very little resistance to his feelings. At one point they are in process of making out, and not a single one of David's thoughts about why he should not do this revolve around the fact that he's married to Millie! That sickened me and was the first time I did not like David in this entire series. In the end, the reason he stops making out with her has nothing whatsoever to do with Millie and is rather pathetic.
I love Millie in this novel and don't see enough of her. She is kick ass, but there are some real problems of tedium with both her and David's segments. Millie's segments are bogged down with her trying to find David, and that wouldn't be at all bad if it were not for the tedious part where she becomes enmeshed with a woman who lives on the street named Sojee, and with a family of illegal immigrants, the Ruizs. Once we're away from that and moving on to physically trying to find David, as well as to discover who the mole is (in the NSA who's passing on secret information about him which facilitated his capture), I enjoyed it just fine.
I have no idea why Gould put this stuff in there, but I do know it was really bogged down the story and bored me to tears. David's whole captivity is a bit tedious to me. I kept wanting something to happen and nothing really did unless it was an incremental change in his method of confinement, which was tedious, quite frankly. I mean it was intriguing how they found new ways to keep him trapped, yet slowly manipulate him into a position where he was both their captive, but free enough of his manacles that he could go out and do their bidding away from his "jail", but let's get there already! There had to have been better ways to get us from A-nnoying to B-etter! This novel could probably have been fifty to a hundred pages shorter and still been just as good overall.
Towards the end it improved significantly, becoming the kind of novel I admire Gould for writing, so based on this overall view, and ignoring the bits i mentioned above, I rate this novel a worthy read!
