Header image with four cats and the text: Pussreboots, a book review nearly every day. Online since 1997
Now 2025 Previous Articles Road Essays Road Reviews Author Black Authors Title Source Age Genre Series Format Inclusivity LGBTA+ Art Portfolio Purchase Art WIP

Recent posts


Month in review

Reviews
Allegiant by Veronica Roth
Avatar: The Last Airbender: Imbalance, Part One by Faith Erin Hicks
The Beauty of the Moment by Tanaz Bhathena
The Big Necessity by Rose George
The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan
Brave by Svetlana Chmakova
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
Delicious in Dungeon Volume 2 by Ryoko Kui
Dragonbreath by Ursula Vernon
The Fever King by Victoria Lee
The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America by Matt Kracht
Galloglass by Scarlett Thomas
The Ghost of Grey Fox Inn by Carolyn Keene
Giant Days, Volume 9 by John Allison
The Great Unknowable End by Kathryn Ormsbee
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Little Guys by Vera Brosgol
Make-A-Saurus: My Life with Raptors and Other Dinosaurs by Brian Cooley
Merci Suárez Changes Gears by Meg Medina
Miss Communication by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm
Murder Lo Mein by Vivien Chien
Nowhere Boy by Katherine Marsh
A Question of Holmes by Brittany Cavallaro
Three Quarters Dead by Richard Peck
The Tiger in the House by Carl Van Vechten
To Brie or Not To Brie by Avery Aames
Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson
The Unteachables by Gordon Korman
We Set the Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia
Where the Heart Is by Jo Knowles
Wild Blues by Beth Kephart

Miscellaneous
April 2019 Sources
April 2019 Summary
The illusion of organized reading
It's Monday! What Are You Reading? (May 06)
It's Monday! What Are You Reading? (May 13)
It's Monday! What Are You Reading? (May 20)
It's Monday! What Are You Reading? (May 27)
May is looking a lot like mid March

Road Essays
CCFF66: Siblings going offroad to utopia

CCFF33: siblings to utopia along the Blue Highway: a brief look at the first seven seasons of Supernatural

CCFF00: Siblings to Utopia via the interstate

CCCCFF: Siblings through the cornfield to uhoria

CCCCCC: Siblings through the maze to uhoria

Road Narrative Update for April 2019

Previous month



Rating System

5 stars: Completely enjoyable or compelling
4 stars: Good but flawed
3 stars: Average
2 stars: OK
1 star: Did not finish


Privacy policy

This blog does not collect personal data. It doesn't set cookies. Email addresses are used to respond to comments or "contact us" messages and then deleted.


CCCCFF: Siblings through the cornfield to uhoria: 05/23/19

CCFF33: A young Sam and Dean from the pilot episode.

The next destination for sibling travelers is uhoria — or no time. These are typically time travel stories, although they don't have to be, as our exemplar, The Million by Karl Schroeder, shows.

Siblings are people raised together by the same parents. In the case of Gavin and his brother, they aren't blood relations. Gavin is an adopted sibling. He's also for reasons the book goes into in finite detail, an undocumented immigrant hiding in plain sight. But from Gavin's point of view, and that of his father and brother (who is a blood relation to the father), they are siblings.

The destination is no-time. While most of my exemplars are actual time travel stories, there are other ways time can assert itself: haunted houses, places isolated from modern trends, or in this case, hibernation. The Millions are the caretakers of the Earth while the majority of its people sleep for a generation to get time on the surface for short, fixed periods. To the Millions, these visitors are a regular annoyance. To the Visitors, those who mostly hibernate, time flies between those periods of enforced sleep.

For Gavin, a visitor who woke too soon and has been living his life among the Millions, he is now out of synch with his original family. When his brother is sentenced to become one of the visitors for killing their father, Gavin and his brother are also put out of synch. It is this artificial asynchronous time flow between the two populations that makes this destination uhoric.

Finally there is the route taken. In this narrative, the route taken is through the cornfield or through the tkaronto — or trees at the water. The visitors hibernate in special underground caverns and the one that criminals are sentenced to is below the school the Millions attend as children. This school happens to be located at Venice — a city built on water. While it's not quite trees and water, it serves as a boundary to the other way of living just as a more conventional cornfield or tkaronto would.

Other versions of this narrative construction could involve siblings running through a cornfield and being thrust forwards or backwards in time. Siblings could be trapped in a cornfield or on a mangrove island that is out of the normal flow of time. Visitors from out of time could arrive on a sibling run farm through the cornfield. Siblings could stop a flood of ghosts from haunting a town that is near a wooded lake.

Know of other books, films, or television episodes that would fit here? Recommend them in the comments below.

Comments  (0)


Lab puppy
Name:
Email (won't be posted):
Blog URL:
Comment:

Tumblr Mastadon Flickr Facebook Facebook Contact me

1997-2025 Sarah Sammis