Skinner Luce

November 16, 2015
Lucy Hennessey grew up thinking she was a normal human being. She learned the hard way that she is a serv, created by the Nafikh, an alien race, to serve them in any capacity whenever they visit Earth. If she lives long enough to meet her service quota, she can be freed; having experienced a normal life, she now sometimes dares to dream what she might do with that freedom. But everything begins to fall apart, and her grim serv world crashes against that of her human family’s when she is linked to the death of a child serv and encounters a tenacious human wielding an uncanny knowledge of the Nafikh (who are otherwise a well-kept secret). Running away is useless, and it seems that the only way for Lucy to save herself and her family is to plunge deeper into the Nafikh’s world. Ward (The Bullet Collection) delivers a gut-punching novel, consistently taut and bleak. Readers will feel Lucy hanging on by her fingernails just beneath the human world and bloodied by every hard climb upward as she tries straddling two lives while fitting into neither. Agent: Matt Bialer, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates.

November 15, 2015
Ward (The Bullet Collection, 2003) offers a tale of a woman discovering her alien origins. On modern-day Earth, a race of powerful aliens known as the Nafikh disguise themselves as human in order to walk among us. But they're a dangerous and often violent lot, so they created a race of Servs, servants who appear completely human, to help clean up their messes. Servs are "dropped" on Earth by their Nafikh masters, often at young ages, and spend their existence living--and very frequently dying--at the whims of their powerful alien overlords. A Serv named Lucy was sent to Earth as a baby, but she was mistaken for a foundling and raised by adoptive human parents. After an anguished childhood feeling like she never fit in, Lucy discovers what she truly is and enters into life as a Serv, although she doesn't quite fit in there, either. She does her best to keep her Serv and human lives separate, but when she's implicated in the death of a Serv child, it looks as though everything will fall apart. Although the plot begins slowly and drifts a bit in the book's first third, once the pace picks up it quickly becomes an absorbing read. The full details of the Nafikh aliens are never completely explained; readers only ever know as much as Lucy knows, which some may find a little frustrating. But Ward's prose is expressive and often unexpectedly beautiful--in one instance, she describes an elderly woman as having "the unmistakable odor of a body collapsing." Lucy's adoptive mother and cousin are especially well-rendered, not just as real human beings, but as people who've been particularly shaped by the environment they live in. Ultimately, though, a plot development at the story's climax leads to a rather dissatisfying ending and keeps the book from being truly exceptional. High-caliber, often engrossing literary sci-fi.

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