Sunburst

A muddled and messy showing from Gotlieb. Sunburst takes place after some sort of nuclear disaster, where radiation has killed off a lot of the older generation, whose surviving children are sometimes left with latent psychic, teleportation, or other superhero powers. These children are rounded up by a government-esque group that locks them in a force field where they can't escape. Shandy, a child that is immune to psychic powers, is eventually rounded up by the government and taken to the facilitate, where she tries to understand her place in freeing the tortured group of children.

If Gotlieb does something well, it's writing characters with emotion. The children in this story are very much people with valid concerns and believable emotions. Certainly for the time, Gotlieb also writes women well, and portrays youth as persons capable of immense mental and emotional strength.

Unfortunately, Gotlieb does a lot more telling than showing. There are many sections of lengthy exposition where the history of the world, the way that powers work, and the government agency are all explained dryly. The limited amount of action that's written here is a jumbled mess that's both confusing and off putting. The prose is at best passable, with no real sense of mastery or artistry to the writing. Overall it just feels like it was written by an amateur.

What's really cringey though is the horribly outdated sociology/psychology that Gotlieb uses as an explanation for why children and delinquents are the only ones to have psi powers:

"Their minds are organized more primitively".
"Most come from families without very strong morals - often immigrants".
"I think these kinds of shirtless helpless people could be a cause of poverty too."

Yeesh. Sort of out of the blue, Gotlieb starts having her main character, a child, go on long expositional diatribes about what a nuisance these kids are, and how their minds are close to that of animals. I don't know if mental illness was really thought of this way in the 60's, but Jesus, even if it was this ages so poorly as to be almost comical. Regardless of the few positive qualities in Sunburst, this turn towards the end of the novel casts a dim shadow over my opinion of it.

Mediocre, forgettable, and sometimes distasteful. I'm glad I only paid a dollar for it, and back to some used bookstore's stack of pulp paperbacks it will go.