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Greenleaf Book Group
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Juno's Song

Adult; General Fiction (including literary and historical); (Market)

Join former literature professor Sean Byron McQueen as he returns to face big questions, big tech, Big Love, and death in his final thrilling adventure. It’s the summer of 2036, and Sean’s beloved, M, has been missing for nine years and is presumed dead. M’s cruel captors have “cursed” Sean with the promise of torture and death, forcing him to live off the grid in a remote Irish tower with a robotic manservant for friendship and protection. When Sean cautiously steps out of his cloistered life, he’s met with exponentially advanced AI and the long-promised, now looming date of alien arrival—9/9/36. Sean’s best friend and renowned writer of “alien lit,” Molly Quinn, leads a CE-5 movement promoting a peaceful alien welcome in opposition to international forces preparing for war. As Sean and Molly try to prevent an imminent War of the Worlds, he grapples with his feelings toward her. Can Sean love again while there’s any chance M still lives? Will he follow his spiritual guide, Juno, into self-realization? Or will his nemesis fulfill the curse, preventing Sean from living long enough to witness the alien arrival and write the final chapter of his Big Love story? With wit and bold imagination, Juno’s Song envisions a rapidly changing world of cutting-edge technology and advanced psychic powers that challenge what it means to be authentically human.
Reviews
The third searching, spiritual adventure in a trilogy, Juno’s Song finds protagonist Sean Byron McQueen, professor and author, in a post-singularity near-future of robots, AIs, holo-chats, heart-sync tech, VR pod lives, and straight-up magic, now recognized as a science. Even more exciting: humanity stands on the precipice of ascension, as the date of September 9, 2036, approaches—the date that aliens (or “ALFs”) “back in 2026 had promised to make significant contact with earthlings.” After the deadly cosmic adventures of the previous book (The Devil’s Calling), Sean is in hiding on the Irish coast, attended to by a robo-manservant and contemplating the possibility of his companionable friendship with novelist Molly blooming into something more. In a vision a decade after her apparent death, Sean’s brilliant wife, M, encourages him to write a new novel, also titled Juno’s Song, in honor of their “trail-blazing spiritual master” daughter.

As the World Tribunal prepares for the arrival of the aliens, Sean awaits the all-clear from Interpol to resume a somewhat public life, who expect that his enemies will stop hunting him after a change of leadership transpires in Russia. Readers of the previous books will surmise that villains Dick and Samantha aren’t through with him yet, and they’ll be right at home with this entry’s ruminative approach and pacing. Much of the novel unfolds as a series of rich, wide-ranging colloquies between Sean and a host of fascinating figures—Molly, Juno, a mysterious billionaire in a Scottish castle—on topics both earthly and cosmic, especially how to greet the aliens, a subject of fierce controversy.

Tension picks up with an NDA and surprise confrontations and hints that the temptress assassin Samantha may still be on the hunt, but readers eager for the easy thrills of first-contact and dystopian future stories should know that Kelley's interest remains in the transcendent, the poetic, the connections between people and something beyond us, and—even more than before—the very act of breathing.

Takeaway: Richly thoughtful novel of first contact and transcendence in 2036.

Comparable Titles: David Michie, Sachin Kaushik.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-

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