At a Manhattan planetarium in 1965, ten-year-old Enzo and his young aunt, Mala, are separated, an event that profoundly alters the rest of their lives. In an epic tale of love and destiny, A Trip to the Stars charts their paths over the next fifteen years as they search for each other and, in the process, discover themselves.
As Enzo and Mala cross continents and seas on their separate journeys, they encounter a dizzying array of people: an arachnologist in New Orleans, an asteroid specialist, a wounded B-52 navigator in Vietnam, a professional mind reader, a maverick NASA astronomer, and countless others. All of them are searching for things they have lost -- loved ones, opportunities, enlightenment. Through them Mala and Enzo discover a world steeped in mystery, romance, and intellectual adventure.
A Trip to the Stars is both a love story and a coming-of-age story that shows us what happens when we lose what matters most. Fusing imagination and suspense with remarkable narrative skill, Nicholas Christopher builds a story of tremendous scope that lingers in detail and sensation long after the last page has been turned.
Amazon.com Review
A Trip to the Stars opens with a kidnapping at a New York planetarium in 1965 and ends exactly 15 years later at a Hawaiian observatory. In the 500 intervening and absurdly readable pages, its two narrators undergo equal parts heartache and discovery--not to mention a fine excess of things astronomical. As Nicholas Christopher's exhilarating third novel begins, 10-year-old Loren reaches for his aunt Alma's hand while the crowd surges around them. Alas, he's in for the first of many jolts:
The woman, who was pulling me hard now to a blue sedan idling at the curb, was not my aunt. Until she opened the rear door and pushed me in, I thought she must have mistaken me for another child. Then, before stepping in after me, she looked me full in the face and betrayed no surprise.
Already twice orphaned, Loren is spirited away from the young woman he considers his only relative and finds himself in a strange building on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Inhabited by "people looking for lost things" and, as he later realizes, "people who had once been lost--like me," the Hotel Canopus is the life work of his uncle, the collector and pomologist Junius Samax. (Let it be known that A Trip to the Stars features the most fanciful monikers this side of Howard Norman's novels.) Now restored to his real name, Enzo, and assured that his aunt has been informed of his fate, the boy is given the sort of home schooling only Nicholas Christopher could dream up--the usual academic suspects enhanced by ancient languages, Zuni wisdom, mnemonics, and, of course, astronomy. (In this novel of multiple stargazers, even Enzo's wolf dog, Sirius, has a head for the heavens.) Meanwhile, Alma, having failed to find her nephew, attempts to rid herself of her past: she changes her name to Mala and, following the most compelling spider bite in all fiction, joins the Navy Nursing Corps and heads for Vietnam.
As the author alternates between Enzo and Mala's very separate universes, he packs his book with suspense and arcana. Echoes and parallels prevail, as do demons and eccentrics. The Hotel Canopus is filled with exotic individuals, including an eight-fingered pianist-arachnologist, an art historian in hot pursuit of Adam's navel, and women named DesirΓ©e, Della, Dolores, Denise, and Dalia. But it also houses a resentful relative or two. A Trip to the Stars is so grounded that all its magic, coincidence, and mystery seem hyper-real, from a girl who becomes a vampire to Mala's lover, a soldier whose shrapnel wounds mirror the Andromeda galaxy. Despite the intricacy of his novel, Nicholas Christopher has wisely declined to preface it with a family tree or a list of dramatis personae. For this we can be grateful, since much of the book's pleasure comes from watching him weave destinies, miracles, and more than a few blood feuds as he proffers the ultimate celestial fix. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
Breathtaking coincidences, magical occurrences, dramatic confrontations, mystical beliefs, the influence of astronomical phenomenon and the intriguing confluence of fate and chance are plot elements that bubble like champagne in Christopher's (Veronica) brilliantly labyrinthine new novel. The theme of lost and found--people, opportunities, knowledge, cultures--permeates the two stories that run parallel in a buoyant, suspenseful narrative that spans 15 tumultuous years. In 1965, an orphan named Loren is celebrating his 10th birthday by visiting a New York planetarium with his adoptive aunt, Alma Verell, when he is kidnapped. He is taken to meet his wealthy, benevolent great-uncle, Junius Samax, who whisks him off to his home in the opulent Hotel Canopus in Las Vegas, where Loren learns his true name, Enzo, and some clues about his maternal parentage. Under Samax's genial protection and tutelage, Enzo enjoys a privileged life and a rich education, as he meets the distinguished scholars who come to stay with Samax, a patron of the arts and an indefatigable searcher after arcane knowledge. But Enzo remains tensely aware that another resident of the hotel, Samax's niece, Ivy, is determined to destroy him. Meanwhile, 20-year-old college classics major Alma, an orphan herself, is frantic at Loren's disappearance. After a police investigation reaches a dead end, she flees to New Orleans, changes her name to Mala Revell, and allows herself to be bitten by a rare Stellarum spider, whose venom endows her with psychic ability. Enlisting in the navy, Mala goes to Vietnam as a nurse, where she falls in love with Geza Cassiel, a wounded airman. After an idyllic few days together, Cassiel is given a new, secret assignment--and disappears. Having now lost two people in her life, Mala begins years of island-hopping in the South Pacific, throwing herself into the '70s counterculture of drugs, booze and promiscuous sex. A tragic accident halts her downward spiral, and her spirit is ready for renewal when fate sends radiant proof of cosmic inevitability, closing one of the concentric circles that gird this complex story. Enzo's quest, which has been a mirror image of Mala's, as the same people have entered both their lives over the years, comes full circle a short time later, in a series of shocking revelations and a regenerating reunion. As background to this intricate narrative, Christopher interweaves erudite details of such subjects as arachnology, vampire lore, quincunxes, architecture, celestial navigation and space exploration, Zuni legends, Greek philosophy--to touch on only a few; despite a few didactic lapses, this material proves intriguingly relevant. Fans of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale will discover a kindred spirit in Christopher's literate prose and exuberant storytelling techniques. Author tour. (Feb.) FYI: Harcourt Brace will publish Christopher's seventh book of poetry in April.
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