Looking For a Good Book

Debbie Reynolds Biondi is the creator of a comic book series called Sputnik Chick: A Girl With No Past. Debbie lives in different timelines.  The comic book series has been an outlet for Debbie to detail her experiences in Atomic Mean Time. In Earth Standard Time, Debbie travels with her apprentice, Unicorn Girl, and Cassandra – an AI who knows all about pop culture.

There are over 2,000 alternate timelines – each created by the detonation of an atomic bomb in Earth Standard Time – and Debbie and Unicorn Girl and Cassandra travel through them, collectively known as the Sisters Sputnik. Debbie’s storytelling skills has her treated with celebrity status throughout the realities and in one particular world, where all books and music have disappeared, Debbie is in bed with an old Earth Standard lover, and he begs her to tell him a story.

This book is … really unusual; highly unique; a pop-culture jambalaya; a literary paella; psychedelic fiction. Think Harlan Ellison and Thomas Disch meet Ernest Cline and Charlie N. Holmberg and the four of them write a story.

I really liked the characters here and the general concept is fabulous. But at times I found this a little hard to follow … and I like off-the-wall unusual sci-fi with mind-bending, time-wrenching concepts. The story-within-a-story … was that really necessary? As a reader, it felt like author Terri Favro had a short story in the Sputnik universe, and to make it a novel, added a little bit around it.

This is, however, one of the books that I think about long after I’ve read it.  A moment will strike and I’ll remember something in the book and wonder about it.  Because of this, this is likely one of the few books I will read a second time, but I’ think I need to re-read Favro’s Sputnik’s Children again before I do.  It’s been almost five years since I read and reviewed that book – a pre-cursor to this.

Looking for a good book? The Sisters Sputnik by Terri Favro is a unique, adventurous fantasy, but it might be good to read/re-read Sputnik’s Children, by the same author, first.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Sisters Sputnik

author: Terri Favro

publisher: ECW Press

ISBN: 1770416080

paperback, 292 pages