Customer Reviews

Preternatural 3 (Preternatural (Tor Books))

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Apparently, Govannon's race's effortlessly traveling through the gats of time ends when a hiccup occurs that leaves the alien people stranded in a void between dimensions. Govannon may be the last of the Mohegans unless he can patch up the flaw in the timeline. He is also stranded and forced to don a human form, which obviously equates to death or marriage and taxes. His human friend Karen, whom he met while Julius Caesar ruled, knows she must save Govannon from either odious fate.

Karen visits Govannon's home planet Relic though he cannot do so for some unknown reason. She enters the Museum, an edifice that contains the history of Govannon's race, in order to create the story of Govannon and his travels. Her theory is that everything will return to normal (whatever that disgustingly is) when Govannon re-finds his alien self once she writes up his memoirs.

As with the first two PRETERNATURAL novels, 3 is a wild science fiction ride that tears into anything and everything that gets in its path. The plot contains multiple story line to include that described above and a Neo-Nazi kidnapping that Margaret Wander Bonanno blends together while acerbically satirizing the universe, ironically including the publishing world being a road kill victim too. Margaret Wander Bonanno takes HG Wells and turns him upside down, in and out, and around. No one does time travel quite as zany and entertainingly as this author does proving that great things obviously comes in threes.

Harriet Klausner

Science Fiction writer Karen Rohmer Guerreri has been through a lot, but now she's got to write herself out of the death of an entire planet. Of the entire species of TQ (third kind alien), only her sometimes-lover Govannon remains--and he only sort of. He's counting on her to write her way to a solution for him and all of his kind. Naturally Karen doesn't have a clue what to write, but the story of Anna, the woman who just might be Joseph Goebbels' illegitimate daughter, keeps coming into her mind. So, without computer, paper, or pen, Karen writes the story. Naturally there are plenty of moments for her to back off and try to sort out where she is in her own life and to sort out the memories that belong to other people and species entirely but that seem to lodge in her mind without much of an invitation.

Neo-nazis have decided that Goebbels was truly the spiritual head of the Third Reich, and that his daughter is the best person to pick up the pieces and create a new German nation. That she's married to a Jew doesn't matter--he can quietly fade into the background. That she just might know the secret to the fabled amber room--looted by the Nazis from Russia and then lost but possibly not destroyed--means that they can actually find the financing for their dream. What Anna wants doesn't matter to them and she is drawn into their plot.

PRETERNATURAL3 is a funny and witty book. Readers who are familiar with the world or writing and the endangered midlist author will share in-group laughs with author Margaret Wander Bonanno and her alter ego Karen. Anna's adventure, and the over-adventure of the hoped for restoral of Govannon's race are compelling enough to keep the reader entertained, but the real justification for this novel is Bonanno's quirky view of the world and her insights into human nature, writing, and time. PRETERNATURAL3 will definitely repay the reader's time in smiles and outright laughs. But just how did she get the novel published through your standard New York editor?