Fourteen-year-old Eva's parents work the the Chimp Pool, so she's grown up with the beloved animals. A car accident leaves her in an irreversible coma, so her consciousness is transferred into the body of a six-year-old chimpanzee named Kelly. The procedure was an experiment, but a successful one...
I immediately thought about this book when I started reading Sapiens, about the history of our species. It's an odd little novel that imagines our distant ancestors as sea apes. Half of the book follows Vinny, the daugher of a modern-day paleontologist (well, taphonomist) who visits the dig site ...
The Valley that young Tilja Urlasdaughter lives in has not always been the peaceful place that she is used to. Several generations back her beloved Valley was plagued by wild tribesmen attacking from the North and soldiers from the Empire attacking from the South. Finally four young people, two...
The Lion Tamer's Daughter is one of four ghostly stories in this collection. All four show ordinary young people encountering something otherworldly and inexplicable. Time travel, ghosts, and two sets of unusual 'twins' are featured. (As a twin myself, I loved these.) Dickinson is a master of no...
I have only read one of Peter Dickenson’s many detective crime novels (thanks to a recent Nancy Pearl recommendation,) and this novel was as immediately distinctive and engaging.Published in 1976 and set in Buckingham Palace and London of the mid 1970’s, the principal players are not members of t...
The Tears of the Salamander by Peter Dickinson is about a young boy named Alfredo who has a love of music and singing, but even more so of his family and helping his father, who is a baker, tend to the fiery ovens of his bakehouse. After a tragic event that killed his immediate family, he was tak...
SOME DEATHS BEFORE DYING. (1999). Peter Dickinson. ***.Rachael Marson is an old woman who is now essentially paralyzed by a crippling disease. Her mind is still active, though, and she can still talk, although with difficulty. All of her life she has involved herself in photography, and prod...
I thought this was a book about the tension between religion, state, and freedom, and neither the plot nor the ideas seemed particularly gripping to me. But in the final pages of the book, the main character, Tron, shares his vision of "the Gods"--a vision that I found incredibly compelling. Usin...
"...science fiction with the science left out and a proper detective story with clues and solutions" - Peter DickinsonAnother selection from the Keating book Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, this time a late 60's British whodunnit with a quirky copper as the protagonist. I would never have ...
Very oddly compelling. I can't think of very many good procedurals which also have supernatural setups -- Kate Wilhelm's Death Qualified is another (I'm sure there are more, that's just one of the few I can think of right now). Very satisfying in that first-five-minutes-of-Prime-Suspect way in wh...
When I was a kid, I loved Dickinson's 'Changes' trilogy, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi story set in Britain. I've read a few of his other books, including some of the short-stories he published with his wife, Robin McKinley (one of my very favorite authors), and always loved his sense of place and hi...