Browne Candidate

Rating:
Summary: A Dark Tale of Love and Action
Review: Author Nicole Givens Kurtz's tale of a dark future is easily one of the best reads this year. Aurora Browne's ordeal as a candidate, women utilized as surrogates under the guise of religion, is one that is harrowing and somberly realisitc.

If you're looking for some excellent new fiction, this novel may be for you. It's a quick read, but well worth it.

Rating:
Summary: What Science Fiction Should Be
Review: Browne Candidate is a strong tale of one woman's struggle for fredom and self-awareness as she fights against who she has been pre-destined to be. Exciting, fast-paced and most importantly of all - fresh. Kurtz has done an exemplary job of creating a near distant future world which is all together fascinating and quite possibly probable.

Rating:
Summary: A Would Be Tomorrow
Review: Imagine a world where most women have been left barren by alleged transgressions of previous generations. One can imagine that the few fertile women are exalted as goddesses. In the world of Aurora; Candidate Browne, this is not case. Early in life, some of those capable of conception are sold by poverty-stricken parents into a life of slavery and forced to do the bidding of the United World Council, who through propaganda have glorified what is referred to as the Candidacy Program. Would be parents are paired with a Candidate who moves into their home to perform the ritual of coupling until conception occurs.

Candidate Browne often recalls the day she was sold into Candidacy and whirled away by a cyborg, kicking and screaming in protest. This would describe Browne's life and stay at the Garden. Despite many attempts to beat her into submission, relentlessly, she dared to dream of freedom. With a tracking device implanted behind her ear set to explode should she stray too far, she may never possess an opportunity to taste what freedom could be.

That is until the Willaimses and yes, freedom may still be a heartbeat away as she learns; when she is selected by them and taken into their home. Browne meets their young, handsome butler and all around handyman-in more ways than one, Bain. Shortly both are romanticizing the other; Bain vows to take Browne away and she hangs on his every word. The world in which they live is a dangerous one, as there are those who fight the order of the World Council and the area is heavily patrolled. Whether Bain can make good on his promise is the question.

Written in third person omniscient, Browne Candidate is a quick and interesting read. I enjoyed Ms. Kurtz's style and literary tone immensely; however, I would have appreciated the read more if I had found it more imaginative. The exact year was not stated, but it is a world of cyborgs and cities built high above a polluted and diseased earth. With the advances in technology in our own time, I would think the future holds computers capable of voice recognition and scanning devices as a means of identification, but yet the soldiers of the Resistance input key codes into what feels like outdated security systems and consume the flesh animals. The synthesizing of soy to imitate flavors of foods we find familiar would have been perfected by then. Like everything else names also evolve and characters such as Angel, Martin, Aurora, and Terry are names I see long forgotten.

Ms. Kurtz did well with imagery, but it sometimes seemed vague by way of setting. I found following the travels of our antiheroes difficult, unable to discern if they were in the city of New England Tre or traveling below, on earth. How they traveled between the two, especially when some parts of earth's atmosphere was poisonous is a mystery. I would liked to have been told more about the city's construction, hundreds of miles above the earth as well as the gravity of the threat the United World Council actually posed to the people. I did enjoy the read however, I found it begged more questions then it answered and the fact there are no pages numbers served as a minor irritant.

Marian E.
APOOO BookClub