Genre: Satire
Description:
“It is December, 1985. The year is winding gently towards its close
until Fergus Girvan, a Classicist at Ariel University, finds his research has
been stolen by the man who is also seeking to steal his daughter. But which man
is, actually, the more unscrupulous of the two? And is there hope for either of
them?”
Author:
Along with being one of BigAl’s Pals, Judi Moore is an author of a
novella, a short story collection, and one other novel in addition to this one.
She was the 2019 winner of the Georgina Hawtrey-Woore Award for adult fiction.
Appraisal:
Imagine Fergus, an aging male academic in the mid-1980s. He’s someone
who has spent his adult life as a professor and unrepentant skirt-chaser. Now
he’s getting older and the world has been changing around him. What was
acceptable in the past, isn’t always so acceptable now. Just to make things especially
interesting, let’s have him discover just recently that he has a daughter he
fathered years ago, now in her late teens. Those fatherly feelings toward his
daughter and not-so-fatherly feelings towards his daughter’s friends are a
microcosm of the conflicts Fergus is going through.
Satire, by definition, is taking something realistic, and exaggerating
it just enough to make a point. As The
Onion has been finding out lately, that can be a hard sweet spot to hit as
the world keeps changing, sometimes in unanticipated ways. I think Wonders Will Never Cease hit that sweet
spot, poking fun at the academic world and men of a certain stripe while making
some points about the difficulties of being a parent and how hard it can be to keep
up with changing cultural norms as a person becomes older.
FYI:
A small amount of adult language.
Author is from the UK and uses UK spelling conventions and slang
terms.
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues.
Rating: *****
Five Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate
word count: 95-100,000 words
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