cover image It's Time: A Nuclear Novel

It's Time: A Nuclear Novel

Jana Bluejay. Tough Dove Books, $7.95 (206pp) ISBN 978-0-9615129-0-3

In recent years, fantasy has become increasingly a vehicle for political allegories and polemics, from Michael Ende's bestselling antinuclear The Neverending Story to Joanna Russ's brilliant, biting, feminist The Female Man. Bluejay tackles both those subjects as well as conservation, censorship and pacifism in her tale of dissident women challenging an oppressive state that is determined to level the last forest. Her idealistic portrait of urban women testing their abilities in the wilderness is tempered by the internal political wrangling among the many factions. Bluejay's earnestness and lyric devotion to nature overcome neither the weak plot and characterization nor her clumsy contrivances (e.g., never referring to men, even when they figure in the story), nor the tedious psychobabble about self-realization. Author tour. November 15