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Tm Holt
Orbit (Little, Brown)
19 June 2011/ ISBN 1841495077
Fantasy/Humor / Contemporary / Worcestershire, England
Amazon
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Reviewed
by Rachel A Hyde
Polly is an estate agent for Blue Remembered Hills Developments
plc and is used to the mundane and the routine. But who or what
is drinking her coffee? And doing her work for her? Also, why is
the dry cleaner’s not there any longer when she knows she
has a garment waiting to be collected? Something strange is going
on involving talking chickens, intelligent pigs and more than one
dimension…
With Tom Holt you can expect the unexpected. I often think of him
as Terry Pratchett in reverse, for whereas Pratchett takes a fantasy
setting and shows us how akin to our own world it is (well, England
at least) Holt shows us how fantasy can arise out of the mundane.
This type of thing is wonderful when it all comes together like
a wooden puzzle made by a master craftsman, but it is also very,
very difficult to do this sort of thing well. As ever, we have the
sensible heroine, more than one nerdy lad, plenty of office humor
and a large helping of complex and detailed description of how it
all works…the speculative science part such as time travel,
a multi-dimensional universe etc. At times the story gets too bogged
down in all this, giving the reader a blast of science without the
fiction, and neither with the humor. But when everything comes together
– and it does – this can be a real mind-expanding page-turner.
It’s not Overtime or The Portable Door,
but it works.
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