Review: The One Hundred

The One Hundred  by Zia Ahmad

Reviewed by Megan Renehan

I’m really, really into details.  They can make or break a book for me.  All the action in the world can’t make up for the lack of those one or two incredible phrases that so perfectly describe a character, a place, a situation that I can see it clearly, exactly as the author intended.  The One Hundred is filled with those details, details that infuse this story with humanity and pathos, and plumb the depths of hope, sadness, loyalty, and fear. 

This novel offers us an intimate view of Javed Iqbal’s real-life crimes and their repercussions.  A rock in a pond, Iqbal’s horrifying murder and disposal of 100 young boys in Pakistan in the late 1990s ripples outwards, connecting the novel’s three main characters in layered rings of tragedy.  Yosef, Saif, and Jogi are all street children who have suffered loss at the hands of Iqbal and end up on a quest for vengeance.  We get to know these boys over the course of the novel, which alternates focus between the characters.  We learn of the horrors and difficulties facing street children in Pakistan.  Ahmad succinctly summarizes the atrocities Yosef was forced to deal with as a child:

On a cold January morning the following year, Yosef sat at a bench outside the bus station, waiting for the bus to arrive. It had been over six months since he stabbed Karim. That day, Mullah Aziz had told him the truth about his parents. He shook his head as the mullah had described how Yosef’s mother was raped in prison by a prison guard. The guard, a married man and his father, contacted Mullah Aziz to come take Yosef away when he turned seven. His mother, Mullah Aziz said, was to be tried as an adulterer in addition to her previous pending charges, since there were no witnesses to come forward and support her claim of rape. 

Though the boys’ circumstances push them into deplorable acts, by making us privy to their stories, Ahmad ensures the reader’s sympathy.  He counteracts the effects the boys’ behavior would normally have on the reader by showing us their souls. 

Jogi had rescued the boy from Meera. That night he founded his own gang, consisting of the one boy he had just rescued. Both gangs avoided interaction by not mingling or intruding into each other’s territory. One thing Meera’s gang was known for was the rampant use of drugs. He encouraged and provided hashish, ganja, and glue to his group. At the end of each day he and his friends gathered in small, unnoticed alleys and shared yellow paper bags of sniffing glue. Jogi, on the other hand, prohibited the use of any kind of drugs among his gang. Occasionally one of them would be tempted to try a free sample offered by one of Meera’s boys, but would be intercepted by Jogi just in time before they were addicted to it. 

“Look at yourself!” Jogi had growled at Kamal, one of the boys he had found last summer intoxicated in the park. “You don’t think life is rough enough for you?”

Any novel that can teach me something is one that I fall for.  Ahmad’s ability to so thoroughly describe the lives of the characters in The One Hundred makes for an incredible reading experience.  Immediately upon beginning this book, the reader is transported to a world we are quite likely unfamiliar with, a world of homelessness and poverty, survival and fear.  Ahmad doesn’t hide from the corruption street children must grapple with in order to survive, the trauma they face on a daily basis.  We are guided through a world that would make a satisfying story on its own, but Ahmad ups the ante by centering his tale on Iqbal’s mass murder.  We can’t help but continue reading. 

Ahmad is not only successful, but masterful in weaving a story that seamlessly blends truth and fiction into an emotional, exciting, evocative novel that is as impossible to forget as it is to put down once you’ve opened it.

Ahmad undertook a daunting task with The One Hundred.  Basing a novel on a true story requires intense imagination and an almost journalistic ability to stay true to the facts.  Ahmad is not only successful, but masterful in weaving a story that seamlessly blends truth and fiction into an emotional, exciting, evocative novel that is as impossible to forget as it is to put down once you’ve opened it.

Review: Jimmy Stu Lives

Jimmy Stu Lives! by Kent McDaniel

Reviewed by Ophelia Julien

Super Science Fiction with a Side of Grits

Reverend James Stuart Sloan, or Jimmy Stu as he prefers, is the founder of Nashville, Tennessee’s Church of the Living Lord, a three-thousand member congregation complete with a church on an acre-sized lawn and a televised service. As an inspirational preacher, Jimmy Stu looks to be at the top of his game. Except that he isn’t. During the latter part of his life, Jimmy Stu has begun to lose his connection with the Almighty, a deep slide into despair accelerated by the death of his beloved wife, Debbi. He is haunted by the idea that Debbi has not gone on to eternal life, but instead has disappeared into oblivion. Aware that his television ratings are starting to slip, prodded by a devout follower who understands that Jimmy Stu’s sermons of late have been phoned in, nudged along by an ambitious self-elected advisor, Jimmy Stu goes from the apathy of having no Easter sermon planned to the wild inspiration of starting a fundraiser to have his head preserved through cryonics so that he may carry out his mission in the future. In a scientific twist on that most venerated Christian holiday, Jimmy Stu Sloan sets up his very own resurrection and convinces his congregation to pay for it. 

The story really starts when Jimmy Stu is awakened 140 years into the future, where he learns that not only did his congregation facilitate his preservation, but that his church has grown into a powerful entity with its own police force and complete control over seven states in the South, as well as having heavy influence through parts of the Midwest. The formidable prime minister of the Church of the Living Lord is a direct descendant of Jimmy Stu’s once-upon-a-time self-elected advisor, Carl Windhorst. And to make matters even worse, Jimmy Stu has been awakened, or resurrected, by his great-great-great-great-nephew, Peter Alvarez, in direct defiance of said Prime Minister, Carl Windhorst III. With no time to get his bearings, Jimmy Stu becomes a fugitive along with nephew Peter and Peter’s companion, Shama Besic. 

Fleeing into rural Tennessee with the Church of the Living Lord’s best agent in pursuit, Jimmy Stu must come to terms with his new life, the mission he is expected to carry out, and survival in the woods outside suburban Nashville – complete with a beautiful moonshiner’s daughter named Connie Lee, who totes a rifle and is not afraid to use it. 

How many of us wouldn’t love a chance to go back into the past and correct one act, one omission, even one hastily-uttered sentence, if we could change the regretted outcome?

Author Kent McDaniel has incorporated teleportation, laser guns, air vans, and other technological devices to satisfy all sci-fi requirements, but he has also layered his book with more than just futuristic action and adventure. Protagonist Jimmy Stu has the opportunity to right the wrongs he set in motion with his last cynical and self-serving act. How many of us wouldn’t love a chance to go back into the past and correct one act, one omission, even one hastily-uttered sentence, if we could change the regretted outcome? And who better to make things right than Jimmy Stu, since it was his own quest for life beyond his natural span of years that made such a hash of the future? 

Additionally, this story takes a pointed, albeit tongue in cheek, look at what can happen when a country allows a church to insert itself into the governmental seat of power. The picture the author paints is far from pretty, disturbingly realistic, and perhaps just a touch allegorical at this time in U.S. history. 

Fans of the subgenre Southern Science Fiction will have a good time following Jimmy Stu as he literally stumbles from one mishap to the next, all while trying to figure out his own place in this confusing future time and win the heart of self-sufficient, self-defensive Connie Lee. Jimmy Stu is the proverbial Everyman: just that this Everyman has a body newly generated from DNA scans of his cryonically preserved head. Enjoy.

Review: Pirates of Mars

Pirates of Mars by Chris Gerrib; Hadley Rille Books; $16.00 trade paperback. $2.99 ebook; © 2012. 

Reviewed by Kent McDaniel

At first, I had trouble getting into Pirates of Mars. Many characters made their appearance in its early pages amidst a lot of action, and I had some difficulty sorting them out. Plus, the scene-setter with which Gerrib begins each chapter threw me off a little: Each gives the day of the week, the day’s date in the “Virgo Year,” the time in Martian Zulu Time, the year and time in GMT--which seems to be some variation of Earth time—and then the scene’s location; in the beginning, I found that all a little confusing as well. 

I persisted, though, and was glad I did. Twenty pages in, I had a handle on the characters and the scene-setters, and Gerrib had me hooked on a roller coaster of a science-fiction thriller: Space pirates have hijacked a cargo ship, killed some of its members, meaning to steal the cargo and hold the remaining crew members for ransom. To complicate matters, the pirates are unable to restart the hijacked ship’s engine, and in desperation send out a Mayday to The Space Rescue  Mission, with whom they end up in a firefight and add two as their hostages. The Space Rescue mission is a cash-strapped organization unwilling to pay ransom for their captured members, so some of its other members organize an “unofficial” rescue-plan. Oh, and did I mention that some of the hijacked ship’s cargo turns out to be mysterious and sinister? 

As I said, the story begins fast-paced, and Gerrib never lets it bog down. He just keeps ratcheting up the suspense and tension as things progress. All the action is complemented by a large cast of well-developed characters and by convincing settings, whether in the various Martian settlements or inside the different space vehicles. Gerrib also relates the microcosm in which his characters play out their drama to the larger political and economic conditions within the solar system in 2074. He obviously devoted much effort to his world building, and it pays off.  I particularly enjoyed the details about everyday life on a space ship and on Mars. In addition, Gerrib, a Navy veteran, had a convincing feel for the culture of a paramilitary group and evinced a good knack for writing the novel’s police procedural aspects. Finally, I congratulate him on managing to refrain from overdoing the rich details of setting. He gives us plenty but never swamps the story with them.

 It all adds up to rollicking good space-opera that hurtles ahead like a starship in warp drive. 

It all adds up to rollicking good space-opera that hurtles ahead like a starship in warp drive. The wild ride carried me past some concerns about a few typos, an over-abundance of coincidences, and occasional questions regarding some characters’ motivation or reasoning. I was having enough fun that I shrugged such matters off. The suspense, action, colorful characters, and exotic setting trumped any minor reservations I had. 

The book calls out for a sequel and for a movie adaptation. I have no doubt that Gerrib intends to provide the former, and should the latter come about, I’ll be in line for a ticket.    

Review: The End

The End, by Paul Roach 

Reviewed by Ophelia Julien

Five Stars for Sheer Ambition 

Five stars, but not just for ambition: also for the audacity to weave together action/adventure with paranormal, metaphysics, thriller, and a dash of science fiction thrown in. The End, by Paul Roach, is such a mixed bag of genres that at the start of it all this reader couldn’t decide whether to scratch her head in confusion or nod in agreement. Turns out that by the time it was over, both impulses were correct. 

The End is the story of Fran O’Rourke, an all-around nice young man who is killed in Afghanistan while trying to pull off a rescue in the middle of a fierce firefight. It is the story of a happily married young woman who becomes deathly ill while pregnant with her first child. It is the story of good vs. evil, heaven and hell, and the fate of mankind as a sort of outcome depending on how the battle goes. And it is also the story of how much we, as human beings, have a part in that outcome. Have I lost anyone yet? The fact of the matter is, the author manages to pull all of this off without losing the reader, as intricately woven as the different strands may be. 

The book starts off a bit slowly, building up steam as background for all the different subplots is presented to the reader. This gives the author, both a surgeon and a military man, ample space to utilize his expertise in both areas. There is enough combat and medical detail for working writers to use this as a reference work for certain types of scenarios. That being said, however, once the different stories do come together the pace picks up considerably and the acceleration rate doesn’t drop until the climax of the book. After that, there remains a curious type of denouement to close out the tale that might almost seem extraneous, but only if one has read this book too lightly. The discussion at the end of the book is crucial to making sense of the entire work and what this author is trying to tell us: in The End, we’re all of us in this together, long after our physical selves have quit the battlefield. 

Be aware, however, that this book, which asks and attempts to answer some of humanity’s biggest questions, will make you stop and think.

Readers of all different genres may find themselves caught up in this work: action/adventure and thriller fans, sci-fi aficionados, even those with a philosophical or metaphysical leaning. The book may be a bit quirky, but quirky can be a terrific thing when it’s entertaining. Be aware, however, that this book, which asks and attempts to answer some of humanity’s biggest questions, will make you stop and think.

Review: Halo of the Damned

Halo of the Damned by Dina Rae 

Reviewed by Ophelia Julien

Current cultural trends show a persisting, growing obsession with all things angel, demon, and darkly supernatural, all with a thread of romance thrown into the mix. Fans of this genre will not be disappointed with Dina Rae’s Halo of the Damned. 

Set ironically in Wheaton, Illinois, a city with one of the highest number of churches per capita, the story opens by acquainting the reader with Andel, the head of an advertising agency that bears the very honest name Evil Empire, after his most recent kill. With just a few leading hints of what is behind this murder, Rae continues with the introduction of heroines Joanna Easterhouse and her sister, Kim. Kim also has a young daughter, Maria, who very early into the story reveals not only her apparent psychic abilities but her importance in the coming maelstrom. 

And there is indeed a storm in the making, spun into high gear when Joanna takes a job at the Evil Empire Agency and becomes inadvertently enmeshed in the otherworld intrigue that is the culture of a business run by a fallen angel. The action of this story begins in Wheaton, wanders north of Illinois to Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, and zooms across the ocean to Florence, Italy before the final resolution back in Wheaton. 

Amazingly enough, with all of the rituals, murders, and yes, blood-sucking and dismemberment, Rae manages to pull off an ending that is both sweet and believable. Ah, romance, one might say, but perhaps the bottom line is that love really can conquer all, even something as formidable as an army of demon worshippers. And the demon. 

"...a devilishly good read."

This book will intrigue readers of dark romance. How Andel is an integral part of the Easterhouse sisters’ past, what they discover about their recently deceased mother and the estranged family that still walks this planet, and how it all relates to an ancient religion born in the Middle East and devoted to angel worship is the stuff of nightmares. Or a devilishly good read.