Jump Start
Gary Carter
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2003 PublishAmerica
ISBN: 1413701930

Have you ever wondered about the dragons in the stories from our past?

From where do our myths of Dragons come? Were they a remnant, like crocodiles, from when Dinosaurs roamed? Was St. George more than a hero? Did he ensure the extinction of a species?

Jump Start starts in the misty myths of the past in a tale about Dragons, power & honor. It soon fast-forwards to the future when trouble threatens from the sky, holding the world hostage.

Jacob Malfusco has devoted himself to two things since his wife was killed in an auto accident 20 years ago: junk food & finding the Holy Grail of paleontology ... the missing link. Now he's in Death Valley with his students, after a particularly wet winter & the desert is awash with flowers ... & something else ... a skeleton of some long ago creature that doesn't fit into any previous category .... that should never have existed.

Camping out near Ayers Rock (Uluru) in Australia in order to study prehistoric petroglyphs, divorced Marsha Kimbrough with her post-graduate daughter discover the tip of a buried pyramid. Excavation reveals the sunken treasure is inscribed with images of Dragons.

Papolov Ulysses Darringer, Nobel Prize winner & aging scientist, is worried. He's just seen a swarm of meteors expelled from the Orion Nebula. Not only is that strange, so many at one time, they're all the same size. Naturally, noone wants to believe deranged Darringer, even when the downpour of what looks like flaming eggs is clearly visible to the naked eye.

Jacob & Marsha meet at a press conference & find they have much in common: a reluctant fascination with Dragons ... & food. As much as they disagree about their origins, it is the Dragons that bring them together in a fight for the survival of Earth as we know it.

The meteorites plunge into the Seven Seas & for a few weeks, everyone catches their breath, even as global temperatures rise. Then carcasses of sea life wash ashore, chewed to pieces. & then the beasts come out of the water, huge juvenal Dragons, who begin to devour everything in their path.

• What happens when a little Japanese girl finds a wounded Dragon & takes care of it?
• What theory does Marsha come up with which everyone dismisses, & which eventually proves devastatingly right on the mark?
• What are the spaceships that come hovering once the Dragons' wings have matured?
• What will the US President & the military think up to defend against these fire-breathing omnivores?

Jump Start is wincingly Ameri-centric -- with their long & vivid mythology about these creatures, I was surprised that Gary Carter omitted anything about what the Chinese did when fantasy becomes reality. While it is often banal, it is also surprisingly entertaining. A rollicking, if improbable & way too short, social science apocalyptic “what-if” tale.

Once I'd settled into Jump Start, I was bitten, & no, it doesn't have “all the answers”, although it was good for a few laughs & did make me think.
(11/21/04)

Rebecca