Tumbling After

Bill Sheehan

Echoes of other writers -- John Crowley, Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon, to name a few -- reverberate throughout the novel. But Tumbling After is no mere pastiche of free-floating science fiction tropes. On the contrary, Witcover has made something powerful and strange out of familiar materials. The story is dauntingly dense, though satisfying. The prose is clean and precise, lending an aura of understated authority to the entire enterprise. And the disparate narratives, which glance continuously, if elliptically, off each other throughout the book, snap sharply together at the end, lending a sudden, startling coherence to all that has gone before.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Two coming-of-age stories-that of pubescent twins Jack and Jilly Doone in 1977 America and that of Kestrel, a mutant 17-year-old of the distant future-converge in Witcover's compelling second novel (after 1997's Waking Beauty), which blends postapocalyptic SF with Philip K. Dick-like speculation on reality. In Kestrel's world, survivors of a viral war are divided into super-teched humans and super-powered mutants who battle each other endlessly. In the Doones' world, Jack seems to gain the power to alter reality after nearly drowning. The twin's Uncle Jimmy, a game designer, has devised "a role-playing game developed both to cash in on and undermine the success of Dungeons & Dragons." Jimmy's game scenario, in which he immerses the twins as pre-market testers, mirrors Kestrel's world. Jack's "power" begins to take over his life. Is he suffering from a breakdown fueled by sexual awakening, the new game and his preternaturally close relationship with Jilly, or has he somehow become involved in a multireality war fought for "the right to determine what is and isn't real"? Kestrel, meanwhile, is involved in just such a war. The increasingly disquieting parallel stories amount to an audacious toss of some complex dice, but the result is a winning, entertaining cross-genre roll. Agent, Chris Schelling at the Ralph Vicinanza Agency. (Mar. 1) FYI: Waking Beauty was shortlisted for Locus and Tiptree awards. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-This clever, ambitious fantasy opens with adolescent twins Jack and Jilly playing on a beach. When the boy goes swimming, the undertow pulls him down. Suddenly, he is standing on the beach-shaken, scared, but okay. Yet he knows that he died in that ocean, and he questions his own sanity. Before long he learns that he and his sister are part of a dangerous contest occurring on a galactic scale with beings that can bend and alter reality to their will. Readers enter a parallel story through Mutes and Norms, a Dungeons-and-Dragons-style game designed by Jack and Jilly's uncle. The hero of this tale is Kestrel-a half-man, half-bird hybrid who is on a quest with other mutants traveling through a wilderness. What starts as a coming-of-age exercise quickly turns into the twins' dangerous fight for their lives. Kestrel begins to discover the full extent of his unique powers and uses them to protect himself and his comrades. Although the two story lines never connect directly, Witcover inserts many parallels between them. Jack and Kestrel also have similar personalities. Themes of power and responsibility echo back and forth between the two tales. With a colorful world and a fresh approach, this book will satisfy readers tired of the standard formulas of quest fantasy.-Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Excessive if superbly imagined: a downbeat adult fantasy about the resonances between a fictional role-playing game and those who play it. As 12-year-old Jack Doone is pulled under a wave outside his family's Delaware shore vacation cottage, a strange feeling, as if his life has changed its course, comes over him. He wakes up on the beach, alive and with a seemingly broken arm that then heals in yet another shift in reality. His twin sister Jilly, with whom he has an almost psychic bond, has no memories of these and other alternate pasts. The two spend the summer of 1977 playing games, one of which, Mutes & Norms, is a role player modeled on Dungeons & Dragons, a creation of their pot-smoking Uncle Jimmy, who, in the absence of the twins' parents, is becoming overly affectionate with their older teenaged sister, Ellen. Jimmy's game pits five mutant races against normal humans in an eerie post-holocaust landscape, and a phantasmagorical netspace-a kind of psychic Internet. Kestrel, a birdlike mutant who can fly and make the wind do his bidding, appeals most to Jack. The narrative shifts between the sexually awakening Jack, who comes to believe he can alter reality to save himself and others, and Kestrel, who must also ferret out a spy in his mutant platoon. Kestrel's world, a paranoid religious tyranny ruled by Holy Rollers-mystical psychics who roll dice-shows the intricate brilliance of the early Samuel Delaney. Witcover (Waking Beauty, not reviewed) sets up, and then deliberately avoids a feel-good unification of these worlds. When Jack and Kestrel attempt to control their destiny, horrifying tragedy results. A nursery rhyme is recast as an intensely imagined nightmare of a tormentedadolescent's fear of the adult world.