The Book: Distant Cousin by Al Past
Review Category: E-Submitted requested review.
The Blurb: A girl who speaks an extinct Indo-European language shows up at an observatory in West Texas warning of disaster headed for Earth. She claims to know this because she has been studying Earth from the moon for 60 years. Obviously she’s crazy, and they kick her out. But the government watched her land and chases and captures her. Running for her life, she makes some odd friends who help her devise an outrageous plan to get her message across. If it doesn’t work, she’ll die along with millions of others. If it does, what then? That’s only the beginning…
Preview Available: Yes indeed there are some short cuts of prose on the website.
Would I buy this? It’s SF. I’m not sure I read a whole heap of alien stuff but I did buy K-PAX so shows what I know. Maybe, in other words.
The Product: I received a PDF reviewer’s copy but the PDF typography was indistinguishable from a commercial publication. So I would take that as a guide. The whole product’s pretty darn nifty in a production values way.
The Nitty Gritty: It seems like another age when I started in on Mr. Past’s novel. It was, in fact, the last time I had access to a laptop and I managed to get the whole way through “Book One” in that volume before I found myself preoccupied to too great a degree to carry on. Although I did not feel that the novel was one I was never going to finish it has taken me a while.
So Book One is pretty decent, decent enough to finish and want to read more. It details the arrival on earth of alien girl Darcy to warn the interstellar hicks of impending meteor based doom. Not spectacular and revolutionary, admittedly, but pretty good stuff, especially once the style slowed down.
As usual the book would have benefited from an editor’s steering hand. It starts out in a blaze of mannered thesaurus-bashing prose that is quite sickly. Once it recovers from this start it settles into a perky economic style that keeps its head down and runs for the finish at a fair old pace. Overall Book One comes in as a pretty well crafted novella.
And so, all this time later, on to Books two and three (although from the look of Mr. Past’s website Book three is actually the basis for the beginning of volume two and from there confusion may grow so I’ll go no further). In the short novella Book two the plot takes a heavy slug veering away from juggling Darcy’s personal life and her SF adventure into a pure exposition of her integration into earth society and her budding romance with journalist Matt Mendez.
To say that this is an extended meander is to be kind. Basically Book two could have adequately been summarised in about a paragraph with nothing major being missed.
Here is where the crux of the story’s problem comes in. The main character has no flaws to speak of. I mean there’s a token effort at making her emotionally distant but that’s not really an Achilles Heel per se. Darcy is stronger than us, faster than us, brighter than us, nicer than us she is all things to most people. If she hadn’t decided to slum it with Mr. Mendez then we wouldn’t even have known about her supposed emotional distance.
Even Mr. Past revolts at this in the end, dispatching a party from the homeworld (or technically the ancient earth colony) who present Darcy and Matt with some difficulties. These are quickly resolved as most of the party are just as nice as Darcy and the one who isn’t is both barking and mentally feeble. So despite the fact that he is stronger, faster and meaner than everyone on the planet he is tricked into falling out of a flying vehicle, much to everyone’s relief.
If this is sounding a bit like someone wrote down a daydream then, well, that’s because it is. The dramatic tension in this volume is trace and what exists is shooed out of the door at hyperspeed to stop the pleasant fantasy becoming hard work.
By the end of the book I was about ready for not reading any more ever. It’s not that the book is bad it’s just that it comes right down at the bottom of the giant list of readable books. There is no hook and no incentive to come back for more and that is a crime that is inexcusable.
Buy this if thrilling plot twists and turns make you nauseous and believable characters are something you can do without. Otherwise I can’t really in good conscience recommend this book.