The Curiosity
A Novel
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A powerful debut novel in which a man frozen in Arctic ice for more than a century awakens in the present day and finds that the greatest discovery is love . . .
When Dr. Kate Philo and her exploration team discover what appears to be a seal frozen in an Arctic iceberg, they believe they have made a momentous breakthrough in their research. Kate is part of the groundbreaking Lazarus Project, run by the egocentric and paranoid genius Erastus Carthage. To date, they have brought small creatures like plankton and shrimp back to life, but only for one tenth of their natural lifespan. As the underwater excavation begins, Kate and her team realize it is not a seal they have found, but a man.
Heedless of the potential consequences, Carthage orders that the frozen man be brought back to the lab in Boston and reanimated. They learn that he was—is—Jeremiah Rice, a man born in 1868, whose last memory is of falling overboard into the Arctic Ocean in 1906. When the news breaks, the media pursue Jeremiah, religious conservatives accuse the Lazarus Project of blasphemy, and the world at large suspects the entire enterprise is a massive fraud.
Thrown together by circumstances beyond their control, Kate and Jeremiah grow closer. But the clock is ticking and Jeremiah’s new life is slipping away. With Carthage planning to exploit Jeremiah while he can, Kate must decide how far she is willing to go to protect the man she has come to love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For his ambitious fiction debut, a contemporary reworking of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, Kiernan (Authentic Patriotism) has crafted an emotionally satisfying and brisk narrative about Jeremiah Rice, a Harvard-educated judge who drowned on a scientific expedition to the Arctic in 1906. His frozen corpse is found, intact in a large iceberg, in the present day by molecular biologist Kate Philo. The evil genius Erastus Carthage, who funded the expedition, successfully reanimates Rice before a media horde. It's a clever conceit, and Kiernan milks it for all it's worth: religiously motivated protestors lambaste the feat as "blasphemy"; the media goes into a predictable frenzy; even the scientists (largely) behave horrifically in their quest for fame and fortune except, of course, for the beautiful and kind-hearted Philo, and the even more perfect Rice, a symbol (and not much more) of a gentler, more innocent age, when people were less "vulgar." There's a sweet bit of romance between Philo and Rice, and Kiernan is good at making the science fiction sound like science fact. But the characters are never much more than mouthpieces for what appear to be the author's pieties. Still, this is a gripping novel with a clever conceit.
