Reflex by Steven Gould

Title: Reflex
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!

Jumper by Steven Gould

Title: Jumper
Author: Steven Gould
Publisher: Tor
Rating: WORTHY!

I reviewed Reflex the first sequel to Jumper here.
I reviewed Impulse the second sequel to Jumper here.

I have to yet again note that Jumper is another of those novels which has a gazillion-and-a-half namesakes! And in Britain, 'jumper' is the word for sweater - now you have no excuse for not knowing! In passing, I also have to wonder what was going through Jeff Laferney's mind when he wrote this one! Maybe I'll read it sometime and see if I can figure it out....

I started reading Jumper some time ago, long before I began blogging, but I don’t remember if I finished it. I think I did but it was so long ago that it feels almost like I'm reading a new novel anyway! The novel begins rather differently from the subsequent movie, and I have to say that I prefer the way the movie portrays David's initiation into the wonderful world of 'side-stepping' space, but the movie seems to show a much younger David at that point in his life. In the novel, he's almost 18 when it all begins.

Far more is made in the novel of David's abuse at the hands of his father, and the scene on the frozen river never happened in the novel. David first jumps away to escape being beaten by his father's belt-buckle because he was late mowing the lawn. Next he jumps to avoid being raped at the hands of a truck driver with whom he got a ride when he fled his father. From that point, for a while, the movie parallels the novel and David ends up in NYC in a seedy hotel, and he robs the bank. He starts grooming and dressing better, but then we depart the movie (or the movie, more accurately, departs the novel) as David meets an intriguing woman by the name of Millie (who is some three years older than he) at an opera, and they begin seeing one another. In the movie, Millie is a schoolmate of David's. In the original, she's a stranger and has far more going for her than does the movie version.

The relationship develops of course, and depressingly for David, Millie insists at one point that their relationship can go nowhere unless they're completely honest with each other. She will dump the jumper, she warns, if she catches him lying and this comes back to bite him. David never takes Millie to Roma, and never gets jailed, his mother never frees him, and there are no Paladins in the novel at all, and no Griffin. David does get to meet his mother quite early on. She's living in California, having moved not because she's the Paladin mother of a jumper, but because her husband beats her and she was so down and terrified that she couldn't even rescue David. When he does finally contact her, finding by accident a link to her, she's overcome by grief and guilt, but they spend a weekend together and talk of getting together soon after she comes back from a business trip to Europe. The next thing David knows is that his mother has been blown up by terrorists who hijacked the plane she was on.

From this point on, he becomes obsessed with vengeance, and starts trying to track down the terrorist who headed the hijacking, saving hundreds of hostages in some other terrorist attacks in the process. As I mentioned, I had read this before, but forgotten I had done so and I was a bit hesitant to have to read this to get to the new one, but I knew I had to read this to get the most out of the middle book, so I bit the bullet and began it. Then came the déjà vu and I thought I'd maybe started it and never finished it, so I felt even more reluctant to go over territory I'd already traveled, but the novel drew me in and was a fun read. Even the terrorist bit which, when I recalled it after reading through the first part of the novel, seemed to me to be more forbidding than I wanted to deal with, turned out to be a good read, so I'm happy I read this - again!

David and Millie work, perhaps better in this than in the third of the trilogy, although we experience less of both of them in that one than in this, of course. The story is told intelligently and humorously, Gould obviously having put a lot of work into the writing, and a lot of thought into what exactly it would mean if a person actually discovered they could teleport. I really enjoyed this and consider it to be a worthy read.

Impulse by Steven Gould

Title: Impulse
Author: Steven Gould
Publisher: Tor
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
P267 "...Though I'm stronger that I look..." should be "...Though I'm stronger than I look..."
P335 "...in plain site of everyone…" should be "...in plain sight of everyone…"

I reviewed Jumper, the first in this trilogy, here.
I reviewed Reflex the first sequel to Jumper here.

The only books by a Gould I'd read up to this point were by Stephen Gould (not Steven) and were all tied to biology, so this is a new experience! However, Gould is the author of the novel that gave, er, impulse to the movie Jumpers, so I'm not completely in alien territory. I love the movie, but have never read the novel behind it. I intend to rectify that after reading this one. There is also an interim novel between Jumpers and Impulse, titled Reflex. I plan on reading that, too. At first I thought this novel was in the same universe but with different characters, but once I began reading, it rapidly became clear that this is actually the third in a trilogy, with David (the jumper from Jumpers and his wife being the parents of Cent, who is the main character in this novel.

Cent is a young woman living in hiding in the deep snows of a Canadian winter. Her parents have jumped (teleported) more times than anyone else in this world. They like to buy food in one part of the world and jump it to the needy elsewhere. One day, snow-boarding when and where she shouldn't, Cent falls victim to an avalanche, and out of fear she jumps to her bedroom. This is the first time she has ever done this, and her mother quickly divines that Cent is now a jumper (although a late developer by the rules of Jumpers), and now that Cent has a bargaining chip to work with, she brow-beats her parents into letting her attend a regular public school so she can actually, for the first time in her life, meet people of her own age.

Millicent (her mom) and David buy a house in a little backwoods town prophetically named New Prospect where they can live in moderate isolation and where Cent can attend school. It was on Cent's first day at school that I fell in love with her. I know, it's shocking. She's way too young for me, but this is a purely literary love, so it's like, you know, all right, really? It was at that point at which I became addicted to this novel, and consequently a wreck, living in daily fear that Gould was going to screw me over with some bad plotting or something equally depression-era worthy. My fears were misplaced!

As if my deep, abiding love for Cent isn't appalling enough, I also fell in love with her two "uncool" friends at school, which is scandalous, but I can't help myself! My name is Ian Wood and I'm a 'cool supporting character' addict. It's been like, thirty seconds since my last fix...! Please note that this other love was doomed to serious failure, but not through any agency of Gould's. Or actually, I guess, in one regard, entirely through the agency of Gould!

Cent's adventures really - and I mean really - take off when she's in high school. She has run-in after run-in with the school bully Carmelia - who insists upon being known as Caffeine. This antagonism starts very mildly, but deteriorates into some serious and dangerous hatred on Caffeine's part. Cent sides with the uncool and unloved in school. She joins the snowboarding team and does well even without her jumping abilities being brought into play. Much more interesting from my PoV, is that she takes the art of jumping to levels even her father never explored, and she often employs her newly-won talents to humiliate and avoid Caffeine. My only problem with this is that I simply didn't get how she was supposed to be doing what she was doing. Vertical velocity was no problem, but I guess I missed the part where she picked up how to do horizontal velocity! Either that or it really wasn't covered very well. But what a cool talent - almost more cool than her jumping from one location to another.

Cent's two friends seemed to fade into the background somewhat as the story continued, which I did not appreciate, but Cent certainly does not, and the "war" between her and the school bully explodes. It was, oddly, tied in with something her father was investigating and arose from Cent's rescuing of two dorky guys upon which Caffeine was preying.

The novel alternates between Cent's first person PoV and a third person description of what her parents, Millie and Davy, are up to - which starts out innocently enough, but then escalates, too! Their portion of the novel is rather small, and was not that interesting to me until later in the story. Cent's was much more dynamic and captivating, especially the killer climax when she excelled herself. This novel actually would have been a terrific novel had there been no sci-fi element and no school bully, and it had been written solely about Cent and her friendship with the "uncool" Jade and Tara! I highly recommend this volume of the trilogy. I'll get back to you on the other two when I've read them!