Subject: "Nobody's Son" by Sean Stewart

From: [email-masked] (Wayne Throop)
Date: 23 Jun 1997 21:05:57 GMT

Nobody's Son, Sean Stewart
	Review Copyright 1997 Wayne Throop

I read Sean Stewart's first published book a while back.  It was "Passion
Play," a deceptively simple premise of a mystery set in a "moral
majority"/"religious right" future.  But it was interesting.  "Mental note
to self: watch for more by this author" was my reaction.

I recently saw two more books by Sean Stewart on the shelves, and got them
both for airplane trip books.  I suppose they do fine as airplane
books... but they aren't the usual potboiler selected for that niche: I
read each cover-to-cover, rather than in little snippets when airline
boredome gets too heavy.

Nobody's Son is the quest story, but rather than ending with the happy
ever after of quest completed and grateful nation, it begins there.  The
protagonist Nobody finds that the nation's nobility isn't so grateful, his
life of west and wewaxation in wetiwement works out about as well as Elmer
Fudd's always do.

Touch of humor but not a farce, touch of politics but not a thriller or
deeply convoluted suspense work, touch of magic but not a normal fantasy,
it's sort of the earthy working out of that happy-ever-after, with some
deep-ish psychological overtones as the hero comes to terms with the
shreds of his motives, and his unresolved "childhood issues" as the
psychobabble goes.

But far from trite psychobabble, the book has the characters come to some
very nicely portrayed self-realization.

But drat, I'm making it sound too dry.  It's not.  It's positively moist
with clever bits of dialogue and scene-setting.

%T Nobody's Son
%A Sean Stewart
%I Ace Berkley
%D May 1995
%P 273 pp.
%G ISBN 0-441-00128-9

Wayne Throop   [email-masked]   http://sheol.org/throopw

See also http://www.isc.rit.edu/~twp3647/ns.html