From Publishers Weekly
Blend a madcap plot involving the legendary Fountain of Youth with a zany cast of barflies, garnish with a thin SF twist, and you've got the ingredients for the latest frothy concoction in Hugo-winner Robinson's (Callahan's Key) multivolume tall tale. Laid-back barkeep Jake Stonebender has been serving customers in The Place, a Key West saloon whose oddball patrons routinely tickle the space-time continuum and occasionally save the universe, for 10 years when he's touched for protection money by Little Tony Donuts, a humvee-sized mafioso who hopes to ingratiate himself with the Five Old Men who own everything in the world. Jake's scientifically precocious daughter, Erin, comes to the rescue with a scheme to sell Tony the fabled Fountain and "prove" its existence with increasingly youthful incarnations of herself conjured through time travel. Mishaps involving Erin's uptight truant officer, misuse of a timehopping gizmo, and-in the tale's soberest moment-terminal illness for one of the regulars, steer the story down fantastically unpredictable avenues. There's more mixer than hard stuff in this fruity farce, but the fare that keeps Robinson's fans coming back for another round-atrocious puns and song parodies, snickering SF in-jokes and the outrageous eccentricities of the series characters-is available in abundance. New and repeat visitors to Callahan's turf will find this a harmless diversion from more serious concerns.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
From Booklist
OK, it's really Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz and Willard the Professor's con. Callahan zapped out of his namesake series long ago and isn't answering his emergency phone. So when Zoey, Erin's mom, gets caught in hard vacuum, Jake, Erin's dad, convenes a neural bank to boost Erin's computer's capacity to calculate where in hard vacuum Zoey is. But that's getting ahead of the story, which begins when a board-of-ed inspector comes to assess whether 13-year-old Erin is receiving adequate home schooling. Now Erin was born smarter than the whole Callahan gang put together. She can teleport and time-travel--otherwise, why would she be the one to rescue Zoey? Anyway, the inspector's threat pales when a mastodon-size would-be Mafioso hits town (Key West) and starts shaking down the gang's watering hole, which Jake runs. Hence the con: gotta get ridda the gorilla. The wordplay flies fast and funny as always in a Callahan's romp, and the characters, regular and new, are pretty darn amusing. If only the long ending weren't so soppy.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
