A Story About "The Gifted" By a Highly Gifted Author -- Review of The Foxes of Caminus by Laura Burroughs

NEW SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY REVIEWS

Reviews Of Recently Published Science Fiction And Fantasy Books

Reviewer: Forrest Schultz schultz_forrest@yahoo.com 770-583-3258

Blog Address: http://newsciencefictionandfantasyreviews.blogspot.com

 October 18, 2013

 

A Story About "The Gifted" By a Highly Gifted Author

 

Laura Burroughs The Foxes of Caminus (Burroughs Books, Inc., 2013)

                            ISBN: 978-0-615-86181-4

 

Reviewed by: Forrest Schultz

 

     The publishing of books by Coweta County authors has been booming for some time now. And the writing of some of these books has taken a lot of work and a lot of time. A case in point is the most recently published one -- The Foxes of Caminus -- the debut novel of Laura Thomas, who lives near Moreland and who writes under her maiden name, Laura Burroughs. It soon becomes clear to the reader that the writing of this tale involved an enormous amount of research in fields as diverse as physics and history and religion (to name a few) -- as well as a great amount of work in world-building and character development. (And some of these characters are "real characters"!). The Foxes in the title refers (mainly) to the teenage twins Harlie and Anya Fox and (secondarily) to their parents [usually through flashbacks]. Caminus is both the name of a secret island and its Academy, which provides an unusual education, which is super-modern in some ways and super-ancient in others. Both the Foxes and Caminus are quite interesting in ways too numerous to discuss in a review.

 

     This is a story about "The Gifted", i.e. children and young people with super-special abilities. The recent sad experience with the TV shows Heroes and Alphas and Touch shows that it takes a specially gifted author to be able to write good stories about The Gifted, the chief lesson being that the focus should be on the gifts and the gifted themselves and not on attempts by criminals to kidnap them, exploit them, etc. Burroughs has learned this lesson well. There is criminal activity involved but the main story line is the understanding of and education in and development of and proper use of the gifts themselves, and of the personal relationships among the Gifted and their teachers. The lesson here is that only a highly gifted author can write a good story about The Gifted!!

     The genre of Burrough's story is partially fantasy -- the locale is a secret island and there are mystic texts and objects in the story -- but it is mainly science fiction: it involves super-advanced computers and other technological devices and exotic physics (zero point fields, nanotechnology, quantum entanglement, etc.).

 

     This is the first book in a series. The Kindle Edition is already out and the print book will be published soon. (For my review I used the printed manuscript, which contains 264 pages.)

 

     Information is available at http://www.burroughsbooks.com/, which is one of the best written, organized, and most beautiful websites I have ever seen.