For the past twenty years, Bronson Powers, former Hollywood stuntman and converted Mormon, has been homesteading deep in the uninhabited desert outside Joshua Tree with his three wives and ten children. Bronson and his wives, Yalulah, Mary, and Jackie, have been raising their family away from the corruption and evil of the modern world. Their insular existence-controversial, difficult, but Edenic-is upended when the ambitious young developer Maya Abbadessa stumbles upon their land. Hoping to make a profit, she crafts a wager with the family that sets in motion a deadly chain of events.
Maya, threatening to report the family to social services, convinces them to enter three of their children into a nearby public school. Bronson and his wives agree that if Maya can prove that the kids do better in town than in their desert oasis, they will sell her a chunk of their priceless plot of land. Suddenly confronted with all the complications of the twenty-first century that they tried to keep out of their lives, the Powerses must reckon with their lifestyle as they try to save it.
Truly Like Lightning, David Duchovny's fourth novel, is a heartbreaking meditation on family, religion, sex, greed, human nature, and the vanishing environment of an ancient desert.
Nothing Technically Wrong, Readers May Hate It Anyway. This is one of those books by a master storyteller that is at once too cerebral *and* too cliche. It is overall a good story, but there is so much to *not* like here. From the hard core leftist politics that get pretty damn preachy (including several anti-Trump diatribes blaming him for all the ills that have been present in this country since its Founding) to ... other events of a personal nature that get too close to spoilery territory to reveal. And yet there is nothing technically wrong here. The story is well edited, it flows well within its frame, it is reasonably researched (and then flung out to left field, X-Files style - though not to a scifi level), the characters are reasonable within the boundaries described in the book (though in real life many of their actions would leave an observer scratching their heads). Ultimately there is enough here to warrant reading the story - and enough here that no matter your politics, you're probably going to want to throw it down in disgust. And yet there is no objective "this is bad" thing to hang removal of so much as a single star on. And thus, this book is recommended.
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26 January, 2021:
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26 January, 2021:
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