TV Series Reviews: Dune (2000) & Children of Dune (2003). SyFy Channel (On Blu-ray DVD).

These were two 3-part SyFy Channel TV mini-series versions of Frank Herbert’s Dune stories, made in the early 2000s. They are available on Amazon in a Blu-ray DVD format, so you may have to buy them to watch these shows. I’ve had little luck finding them on any streaming sites, although they may reappear from time to time.

I saw them when the two mini-series first came out, and decided to see them again recently, since I had remembered they were good, and I had been re-reading the books. I thought after watching them again that they held up well to repeat viewing, even all these years later.

Since the first publication of Dune (as a book) in the 1960s, there have been repeated efforts by various Hollywood producers and studios to turn it into a blockbuster movie, most of which have failed to even reach the production phase. This gave rise to the widespread industry belief that the books are unfilmable.

The only full-length feature version that made it to the big screen (until last year's spectacular Dune, Part 1 production) was released to great fanfare in 1984. It was directed by David Lynch, and starred local UW drama grad Kyle McLachlan.

Unfortunately, it was a notorious bust. I still remember waiting eagerly for the release, then sitting in an overheated downtown Seattle theater and fuming when the projector broke in the middle of the show, which proved to be a lackluster and unexciting event even when they did finally manage to get it running again. What a disappointment! It couldn’t hold a candle to the joy and excitement of a Star Wars movie launch from that era.

However, Lynch’s failure didn’t mean that these stories were really unfilmable. Perhaps only Peter Jackson, with his marvelous Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, has ever taken on a movie-making mega-project based on a widely-loved book series of comparable difficulty and aced it (and it’s interesting to note that the Lord of the Rings trilogy was also for a long time thought to be “unfilmable”, after its own decades-long series of production attempts and failures).

In any event, given the huge sweep of future historical time, the plots and intrigue, strange technologies, vital characters, mysterious organizations, warring cultures and action across the first three Dune books, it was never going to be possible to tell the whole story in one two-hour show. A TV mini-series in retrospect looks like a much more reasonable way to approach a story of this complexity and length.

It’s true that these SyFy channel Dune TV mini-series versions have special effects that are not that impressive by contemporary CGI standards, but the most compelling features of Dune for fans have always been more about the characters and the plots than the visual aspects, at least until the release of the excellent new Dune movie last year, which I previously reviewed. And these SyFy Channel series did do a credible job of presenting the characters and the plots of the first three books, a cinematic feat that has not been matched yet by any other producers or directors.

So while we’re waiting for the big-screen release of Dune, Part 2 in a year or two, these two TV mini-series do convey the essential elements of the first three books (Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune) for enthusiasts who can’t wait, and they do a very respectable job of it if you can find the shows to watch. Recommended.

Book Review: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (2014). Steven Johnson.

For those who haven't heard of him, Steven Johnson is probably one of the top science historians writing for popular audiences today. Awhile ago, I reviewed his most recent book Extra Life (2021), his thorough inquiry into causes of the rapid increases in human longevity over the past couple of centuries. It’s the latest in his still-growing list of fascinating works of history about science, technology and innovation, and their roles in the development of modern social life and its conditions.

He has several other good books which I hope to review in the future, but for today I wanted to go back to the first of his books that I read, which is still probably my favorite of his. It’s called How We Got to Now, which might seem to be an absurdly broad and overwhelming topic, if he hadn’t limited it to looking at the outsized impact of a few discoveries and technologies which have had truly profound effects on the way we live, and what we as individuals and societies now have and can do.

As his fans know, Johnson’s strength as a historian of science, particularly evident in this wonderful book, is to notice obvious things hiding in plain sight, the things we are all aware of but rarely stop to consider how important they are, and to then explore them..

He begins with a chapter on glass, for example, that ubiquitous material that humans have made for millennia by melting sand, and even used to create art, windows and useful household objects. In Johnson’s telling, though, glass only began to have a truly revolutionary effect on the human condition when a few amateur experimenters learned how to create lenses with it.

As their experiments led to greater understanding of light and the visible spectrum’s physics, other researchers and hobbyists discovered that a lens could cure many eyesight problems (through the creation of glasses), while allowing scientists to far more effectively see and study both the grand and distant (the planet and the universe, via telescopes), and the very small and near (such as microscopic-sized life forms in the body and the environment). These new tools caused an explosion in our scientific and practical knowledge of the material universe around us, and the bodies we inhabit, over a relatively very short period of historical time.

From there, he explores yet more new inventions which have been made possible through our steady progress in learning how to mold and form glass, including the development of fiberglass and glass-based composite materials; the development of the fiber optics at the center of our global communications networks; the television screen that has so profoundly changed our societies; and the glass vacuum tubes that were prerequisites to the beginnings of radio, television, and computing. And that’s all just in one chapter!

For each such area of vital innovation he describes, he tells the fascinating stories of the people who in many cases stumbled unexpectedly into their discoveries, then shows the ways key information was shared and passed along, and how the initial discoveries had their impacts amplified through social networks of other curious and inventive people. He does a great job of tracing other serial developments that flowed from early breakthroughs, and illustrating the mechanisms by which invention and innovations spread and change through society.

It’s a surprising , eye-opening and highly entertaining tour through the science history of a half-dozen of the most important human discoveries that have shaped the world in which we live, told by an expert and insightful narrator. Highly recommended.

TV Review: The Rings of Power (Lord of the Rings), Season 1. Amazon Prime.

There isn’t really enough of this new television series available to do a proper review yet: the long-awaited prequel story from Amazon Studios, which takes place a thousand or more years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings, was just launched on the 1st of September, with only the first two episodes available so far. New episodes will appear every Friday through the end of the first season.

Still, I wanted to share my first impressions and some information about the show immediately. I believe this is likely to become an immensely popular series, because it appears to be far above the standard of much of the new programming I’ve watched lately, and it brings new content to one of the greatest and most popular intellectual properties of our times.

The Rings of Power is not exactly based on a book or book series – instead, it is loosely based on the notes and appendices the author, J.R.R. Tolkien, included in The Lord of the Rings, and other writings, in which he sketched out the elaborate histories of ancient peoples, wars, cultures, languages and characters in his imaginary world of Middle Earth.

This lack of a specific and well-known plot is probably an advantage for the producers and writers, and the viewers as well, in that unlike Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, which were beloved and well-known books, read by millions of readers over generations before they were successfully made into movies, this series is more of a blank slate in terms of the stories to be told.

Of course, we do have an expectation about the quality of the TV shows, and what their look and feel should be, based on Peter Jackson’s fabulous Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movie trilogies. This new TV show does not disappoint in that respect at all. The first two episodes feature gorgeous mythical landscapes, ancient maps, and high-definition scenes of the characters, costumes and settings, looking very similar to the fantasy world that Jackson created for his two series.

On the other hand, there are some subtle differences – it’s an earlier time in Middle Earth history. The races, their homes and their wardrobes are not identical (for example, the proto-Hobbits are called Harfoots), and most noticeably, this series is more inclusive and diverse than the Jackson movies in terms of the actors and characters, a welcome improvement that reflects the changing times and improved opportunities for minority performers since Jackson’s movies were made.

One similarity to the movies is the numerous parallel stories to be followed, as we constantly switch back and forth from one to another. There are also a few familiar characters, most notably Galadriel, the Elven Queen of the Lord of the Rings stories (played so brilliantly by Cate Blanchett in the Jackson films). Galadriel is also present, and clearly a central figure, in this earlier epic too (elves being more or less immortal, or at least very long-lived). We see her here at a younger age (played by Morfydd Clark), as a warrior and Elf leader, obsessively following the trail of the missing Dark Lord Sauron, even while her fellow elves want to believe he has passed away.

But as with Lord of the Rings, there are many other races, characters and stories to be told too, and battles to be fought, as the dark shadow of Sauron’s evil begins to fall across Middle Earth in this earlier age. And we know in advance there are rings of power to be forged, rings that will become so important in the later stories with which we are more familiar.

One of the interesting things I have read out about the making of this show, which is noteworthy from an entertainment business standpoint, is that it is being made with the personal financial backing of Jeff Bezos. He has ordered five seasons, because he is apparently a huge fan of Tolkien’s stories, and perhaps also because he’s looking for his own multimedia fictional universe property for Amazon to control, like the worlds of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Marvel and DC comics that are owned by other studios. One positive aspect of his involvement is that there’s little risk the show will fail too soon for lack of ratings, or for poor quality due to lack of production resources – it would appear we’re going to get five well-produced seasons, whether it’s hugely popular or not.  

But I doubt that’s much of a risk. I’m reasonably confident, based on what I’ve seen so far, that this series is headed for greatness. I've been told that not everyone is a dedicated fan of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, so if you’re not, this might not be your cup of tea. But if you are – watch this show. Highly recommended.

Book Reviews: Honorable Mentions: Fiction, Mysteries and Thrillers.

Today I'm posting another one of my "Honorable Mentions" special features of short reviews of five related types of books.  Today I want to talk about historical novels, spy thrillers and mysteries I've enjoyed. 

Book Review: The Girl From Venice (2016). Martin Cruz Smith.

Martin Cruz Smith is a very good and rather prolific thriller writer, most famous for his nine-book Gorky Park series about Arkady Renko, the disillusioned Russian police detective just trying to do his job while faced with nearly insurmountable political, bureaucratic and international espionage situations in the late Cold War and post-Cold War eras.

The Girl from Venice is one of his creative departures from the Arkady Renko books (I previously reviewed another one, December 6). This one is also a very worthwhile entertainment, and a quick-read historical thriller, about a 28-year-old war-weary fisherman in 1945 Italy, who catches a "dead" young woman in his fishing net, only to stumble into a whole series of dangerous situations as World War II in Italy, and the Allied invasion, rushes to its final chaotic conclusion. Recommended.
 

Book Review: The Red Sparrow Trilogy: Red Sparrow (2013), Palace of Treason (2015), and The Kremlin’s Candidate (2018). Jason Matthews.

This is an excellent set of modern spy novels, written by a real-life veteran CIA agent. When the cold war ended, a lot of us thought it might be the end of the great spy novel era too. As this trilogy demonstrates, there’s nothing to worry about on that front – the world’s second oldest profession is alive and well, along with the literary scene devoted to it.

These books have well-developed characters, a brave and tough heroine, great plots, nerve-shattering suspense, incredible complexity and realistic details of how modern spy operations are planned and carried out. The fact that they centered on the vicious and toxic regime of Vladimir Putin and the political world of post-Soviet Russia, before all of us were fully aware of the nature of his brutal regime, gives the books added authenticity.

The first book, Red Sparrow, was made into a popular spy thriller movie starring Jennifer Lawrence. These books are all recommended.
  

Book Review: Everyone Brave is Forgiven (2016). Chris Cleave.

This is a fictional story of three young people (a woman and two men) coming of age in London and Malta during the Blitz in the early part of World War II. Through their stories, we see the hard choices each one has to make, between their dreams for their own personal futures, and the unavoidable and limited options to be had in a time of war, sacrifice and loss.

There’s a love triangle, and a good English World War II adventure story, with a particularly vivid description of the lesser-known privations and tragedy of the British attempts to defend Malta. 

Apparently the author was inspired to tell this story by love letters from the period by family members. The book is beautifully written. Recommended.
  

Book Review: Midnight in Europe (2015). Alan Furst.

This book is a predictably great read, as we can expect with most Alan Furst novels. For those who are not familiar with him, Alan Furst is arguably the best World War II spy fiction thriller writer of our generation. 

His books tend to take place in different locales across Europe in the pre-war 1930s, and during the early war years, and he focuses on portraying the kinds of dangerous situations and unavoidable daily moral choices people faced as a consequence of the simultaneous rise of fascism and Soviet communism during this period.

This particular novel takes place in Paris in 1938, as the Spanish Republicans try desperately to find arms across Europe for their lost cause, the Spanish Civil War against General Franco and his army. It has Furst’s usual cast of mostly middle-aged men and women trying to figure out how to survive and maneuver against Nazi and Soviet spies and sympathizers, the secret police of various countries, local informers and the coming onslaught of total war. Recommended. 

 

Book Review: Another Man's Moccasins (2008). Craig Johnson. Walt Longmire Series #4. 

I previously reviewed the first three books in Craig Johnson’s 20+ book series about his modern western sheriff Walt Longmire, and his fictional Wyoming world of Absaroka County, where he tries to keep the peace and solve murders in his fraught small-town rural community of whites, Native Americans, Basques and others, with the help of a memorable supporting cast, including his Indian friend Henry Standing Bear, his tough young female deputy Vic Moretti, his daughter Cady and others.

Along the way, he usually has to interact with and come to understand a variety of new local characters and competing economic interests, in order to get to the bottom of whatever crime has been committed.

In Another Man’s Moccasins, the main crime at the heart of the story involves the murder of a young Vietnamese woman, possibly but not definitely by a disturbed young Crow Indian man. Without giving away the plot, I’ll just mention that there is a story line about sex trafficking, but also a mysterious link to Longmire’s own history as a U.S. Marine Military Policeman in the Vietnam war, a plot device that allows the author to further develop Longmire’s character and backstory, as well as that of Henry Standing Bear and their lifelong friendship.

This will probably be my last Longmire book review – it’s a very good series, the best murder mystery series I’ve encountered recently (I’m not generally that big a fan of the genre), especially because of the excellent characters and great dialogue. But it is a long series, and after awhile it just becomes an enjoyable pastime to read them. They’re not that individually memorable after you've read a few -- a common problem with long-running mystery series, I find. But still, recommended.

Book Review: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016). Sebastian Junger.

This 2016 book by Sebastian Junger, the noted action journalist and chronicler of people under extreme duress, whether at sea, as in The Perfect Storm (1997), in forest fires, as in Fire (2001), or at war in War (2010), is a short, intriguing discussion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in veterans, which he explains as an understandable reaction of fighters to the experience of returning from war, and leaving the close-knit fellowship and shared purpose of small combat units, in exchange for the atomized, anonymous and mundane state of individual life in modern society.

Drawing in part from his own experiences and observations, which included months as a journalist embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan, as well as the literature and recorded history of war and warriors going all the way back to the Greeks, Junger explores the "natural" state of humans living in small groups, with their strong values of mutual aid and communal life, which are now mostly found only in armies, war zones, natural disasters, and in some of the few remaining primitive societies on Earth. 

He contrasts that with the widespread personal alienation and loneliness of life in a mass consumer society, which many returning veterans find so alienating, and which creates so much anxiety for them when they return to civilian life.

In developing support for his viewpoint, he also reviews the well-known and widespread phenomenon of “civilized” people kidnapped into primitive societies where similar bonds of mutual closeness and dependence existed, particularly cases of white settlers on the American western frontier who were taken forcibly into Native American tribes, but once there, did not want to leave, even when freed and given the opportunity to return to the white settler society from which they originally had come.

All of this leads the author to his main thesis (and this certainly has been controversial) that the problem of PTSD may be not so much with the soldiers and their traumatic, violent war experiences, as with the nature of the alienating and isolating modern societies to which they return. 

Without necessarily accepting Junger’s theory as a complete explanation of the problem of PTSD, and the difficulty that warriors have in returning to civilian life, this is a thought-provoking and insightful study of the lingering damages of war to the psyches of combat veterans. But it is also an exploration of the deficiencies of modern advanced societies, and the ways they may fail to meet basic human psychological and emotional needs, although we may not be aware of these deficiencies if we’ve never experienced the sort of intense, inter-dependent connections to the people around us that Junger describes. Recommended. 

Book Review: The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age (2020). Steve Olson.

In my senior year at university as a political science major, I wrote two long papers on different aspects of the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons, one of which focused particularly on why the U.S. government made the decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, and whether that was the right decision, based on all the complex geo-political and military calculations that American leaders had to take into account in making that world-changing and city-destroying decision at the end of the war.

In the intervening half century, the history of the development of nuclear weapons and how we began the perilous nuclear age has continued to draw the interest of historians, philosophers and scientists. We might have expected that almost everything about the Manhattan Project and the race to beat Hitler’s Germany in developing atomic weapons has been researched and published by now, but that turns out not to be true.

In The Apocalypse Factory, we learn about another key chapter in the story, which has received relatively less historical coverage: the story of how plutonium, a radioactive element which occurs rarely in nature, became the essential ingredient in atomic weapons, and how it was first manufactured for the American nuclear weapons industry.

Olson relates the history of the academic chemists in the late 1930s who first created plutonium from uranium through complex chemistry experiments, how plutonium and the ability to manufacture it as a byproduct of uranium-based fission solved key problems of bomb-making, and how Manhattan Project scientists and leaders, in combination with the DuPont company, quickly created a factory at Hanford, Washington, to turn plutonium creation into an industrial process.

From the history of the invention of nuclear weapons science and technology, and how the industrial processes were developed, the author goes on to provide a brief social history of the Tri-Cities area in eastern Washington, which grew rapidly from rural desert scrub land under the wartime urgency of the project, as thousands of workers poured into the area under conditions of strict secrecy. 

It’s a particularly interesting look back for those of us in Washington state who know about Hanford and it’s terrible waste disposal problems, but not as much about the more human story of how the three cities grew together, and developed their own distinct local culture.

The latter part of the book tells the story of the Nagasaki bombing, which is uniquely tied to the Hanford plutonium story in that the Hiroshima bomb (the first bomb dropped on Japan) was a one-time design, using uranium as the bomb fuel, where the two masses of uranium to be combined to start the runaway fission process were fired at each other down a gun-like barrel. The Nagasaki bombing used the plutonium implosion design, which has become the model for all subsequent atomic bombs. In that sense, the Nagasaki bombing is more closely tied to the work done at Hanford than at the other Manhattan Project sites.

After exploring the human and infrastructure impacts of the bombing, the author talks a little about the legacies of plutonium production: the permanent threat of nuclear weapons to human civilization which has thus far eluded real solutions, and the environmental problems of waste cleanup at the Hanford site. None of it is news, especially to those of us in the Northwest, but Olson does a good job covering the backstory, and the lasting problems left over from the war-driven invention of this monstrous technology of destruction. Recommended.

Movie Review: The Beatles: Get Back! (2021). Disney+.

Another month has slipped by, and here we are – it’s Rock and Roll Friday at The Memory Cache blog again! Today I’d like to begin by posing the question: what happens when you take more than a hundred hours of archival film of the most important rock and roll band ever while they were in the studio during the recording of their final album together, and hand it to one of the greatest filmmakers in our lifetime to make a documentary mini-series?

The very exciting answer to that question is that you get the three-part Beatles docuseries The Beatles: Get Back! by Peter Jackson, running about eight hours total, covering a 21-day series of recording sessions at Twickenham Studios and then Apple Studios in London with the Beatles as they made the Let It Be album in 1969. The mini-series is available on the Disney+ streaming service, and was released in late November of last year.

As Beatles fans and historians know, the film footage shot during these sessions was originally used to create the documentary film The Beatles: Let It Be, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. That film has long been regarded as a depressing and negative farewell send-off to the Beatles, focusing as it did on the tensions in the band that were driving it toward the inevitable breakup that followed shortly thereafter.

When Jackson, a lifelong Beatles fan, was approached about the possibility of revisiting the source film to make a new version of essentially the same subject as the The Beatles: Let It Be documentary, he was reportedly reluctant to take the project on, until he saw all the film, and realized there might be a more interesting and uplifting story to be told in retrospect than had been presented in the original documentary.

And indeed, that is what he has done. It’s worth noting there was also a formidable technical challenge involved, which was that much of the 50-year old source film was not in good condition, so he had to use the same kinds of advanced cinematic magic he had employed in restoring and enhancing 100-year old archival film for his 2018 World War I documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, to make a movie that had the look and feel, and the visual and sound quality, of a contemporary production.

But the main challenge for Jackson, with the help of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and the support of Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, was always going to be to show the Beatles as they really were, together, at work and in a private setting, this incredibly talented group of four professional musicians whose astonishing history together had welded them into a close-knit family, even with all the pressures and animosities that were by then corroding their ability to stay together as a band.

I can see how this show might not be for everyone. The three episodes are each long (2-3 hours apiece), and for much of the time, not that much is happening in terms of action or plot. The four Beatles come and go, with their friends, wives and lovers, and their entourages, while the others are trying out new bits for the songs they’re writing together, or pairing up to play some of their old songs just for fun. We hear their playful banter with each other, which was real – we can see that it wasn’t something they just put on for the media in public, or created for their movies. We also hear them discussing their relationships, like an old married couple squabbling about the frustrations of a long domestic life together.

But we also get to see the miracle of their music creation process. Unlike most of the earlier Beatles albums, the songs on the Let It Be album were written in the studio, in real time. It wasn’t like most of their albums, where John, Paul and George would show up with songs already written, and ready to record. In this documentary, we watch them coming up with new lyrics, guitar bits and chords, and Ringo’s unique drum tracks, right before our eyes. And to them, these creations were all new – they hadn’t heard them as iconic sounds of the 1960s, played millions of times since around the world for over a half century, as we all have.

The documentary ends with their famous roof-top concert, where they played their last public performance together, and showcased many of the songs that would be on this final studio album they made together. It’s a triumphal moment, and another demonstration of the close bonds between the four of them, even as things were falling apart. We see the sheer joy and fun of playing for a live audience again, after more than three years of not touring, that captures for a final time the magical connection they had together as a close-knit brotherhood of legendary performing artists, which was such a powerful part of what has made them so beloved by generations of fans.

For anyone who is interested in the Beatles, this documentary is indispensable. It definitely has its bittersweet moments, and it inevitably shares some of the unavoidable facts about the state of their relationships at that time that made The Beatles: Let It Be seem like such a bummer, but it also highlights much of what the Beatles still shared with each other, particularly their joy in creating and playing their unique brand of generation-defining rock music. Highly recommended.    

Book Review: The Lincoln Highway (2021). Amor Towles.

The Lincoln Highway is the third and most recent bestselling historical novel by Amor Towles, who left a twenty-year career as an investment professional to become (more or less out of nowhere) one of our most skilled contemporary novelists and storytellers. It has some similarities to the other two novels, but diverges in its narrative approach, which entails jumping back and forth between the stories of four different characters, all tied together by their roles in a youthful road trip.

Towles’ specialty seems to be in focusing in on the lives of rather ordinary fictional characters, and artfully depicting their everyday growth and struggles, while bringing alive the historical eras in which their lives take place. In the process, his beautifully drawn main protagonists also come into contact with other interesting characters, and find themselves in unexpected situations that range from the amusing and mundane to the morally challenging and dangerous.

In his first novel, Rules of Civility (previously reviewed), his main protagonist is a young woman from a lower class background, trying to work, party and find her way into the elite social world of New York’s upper class during the 1930s. In A Gentleman in Moscow (also previously reviewed), Towles’ main character is a former member of the Russian aristocracy, now trying to build a life under house arrest in Moscow in the post-revolutionary 1920s.

The Lincoln Highway is primarily the story of Emmett, an 18-year old Nebraska boy in 1954 rural America, who is being driven home at the beginning of the story to his late father’s farm. Emmett is driven by the warden from the reform school where Emmett had been incarcerated for the past year, for accidentally killing another young man with an angry (if perhaps justified) punch. Waiting there for him at the farm are his exceptionally bright 8-year old brother, as well as a neighbor girl (who appears to be fond of him) and her farmer father, who wants to acquire the farm.

In the course of the first chapters, we realize that Emmett is basically a good kid, who lost his temper and made a mistake, but who’s done some growing up as a result of his hard life experience. However, his immediate prospects are discouraging: the family farm is forfeit because of his father’s inability to make it work, so Emmett has a different plan. He wants to abandon the farm, take the small amount of money he inherits, and set out with his younger brother in his well-maintained Studebaker sedan to California, where he hopes to start buying and renovating houses, and building a good life for the two of them.

Unfortunately, fate has different ideas, in the form of two of his fellow young prisoners, who appear unexpectedly after escaping and stowing away in the warden’s car, with their own plan to join Emmett and his brother on their road trip. These two young fugitives have come up with a plot to steal one of their inheritances on the way, and share the loot among the four of them. What could go wrong? But of course, plenty could and does go wrong, and eventually they will all end up not in California, but in New York instead.

Along the way they get separated, face different dangers, meet unusual new characters, reunite, and bring their strange road trip to its unexpected end, with powerful and life-changing consequences for each of them.

At the beginning, as soon as the two escaped prisoners showed up and revealed a little about their respective characters and backgrounds, I could barely stand to keep reading. It was so obvious that they were going to spell trouble for Emmett and his little brother, and that their clever plot would go wrong. Three teenage young men with histories of poor judgment, and a vulnerable but precocious child, heading off in a car on a seemingly larcenous and crackpot quest? It sounded like a prescription for a heart-breaking disaster.  

Fortunately, the plot twists and surprises continued to be intriguing and unexpected, and new revelations continually added depth to each of the characters, so I kept with the story just to find out what would happen next. It turned out to be well worth the trouble, as the pace steadily picked up, and the suspense increased all the way to the dramatic conclusion. Recommended.