- Wood, Fenton.
The Earth a Machine to Speak.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2020.
ASIN B08D6J4PJ8.
-
This is the fifth and final short novel/novella (134 pages) in
the author's Yankee Republic series. I described
the first, Pirates of the Electromagnetic
Waves (May 2019), as “utterly
charming”, and the second, Five Million
Watts (June 2019), “enchanting”.
The third, The Tower of the Bear
(October 2019), takes Philo from the depths of the ocean to
the Great Tree in the exotic West and the fourth,
The City of Illusions (January 2020)
continues the quest, including a visit to a surreal amusement
park in the miasma cloaking the Valley of the Angels.
In this concluding installment, it's time to pull all of the
various threads from the earlier episodes of Philo's hero quest
together, and the author manages this deftly, in a thoroughly
satisfying, delightful, and heart-warming way. This is a
magnificent adventure which young adults will enjoy as much as I
did the Tom Swift novels in my
youth (and once again when bringing them to the Web), and
not-so-young adults will enjoy just as much or more, as there
are many gems and references they'll discover which younger
readers may not have yet encountered.
This book is currently available only in a Kindle edition.
An omnibus collection including all five novellas,
Yankee Republic Omnibus:
A Mythic Radio Adventure, is available as a
Kindle edition from Amazon, or as a 650 page trade paperback
directly from the
author.
January 2021 