Prodigy Hardcover – Bargain Price, December 27, 2005

This book was so good until it was about 2/3 done. That's when it started to drag and drone about the horrible deed done to one of the not-so-main characters. It made this book less than wonderful and kept taking away from the two main characters. It also didn't help that every other character that I thought was a good guy turned out to be truly terrible.

The year is 2036, the location is California, and the place is the Stansbury School, a super-elite, 125-story, K-12 boarding school. In this era, cars fly Jetson-style, the streets on ground level have been abandoned to junkies and criminals, and the California coast has metastasized Los Angeles and San Francisco into a San Angeles megalopolis.Kalstein's self-contradictory premise begins with the populist notion that the public education system of 2008 was in complete collapse, blaming overpaid ($211,000 for a high school math teacher in 2008?) and underworked teachers and their intractable unions for the failure to educate children past a fourth grade level. In response, a high school principal named Raymond Stansbury (who conveniently happens to own a "California ranch estate") convinces 45 of the country's best teachers to quit their jobs simultaneously (shades of John Galt and ATLAS SHRUGGED) to join the newly formed (and certainly not accidentally named) Charter School in 2009.For a mere $100,000 annual tuition, parents could enroll their little darlings as specimens, Dr. Stansbury's endearing term for his pupils. Specimens they indeed are, since the loving Dr. Stansbury clearly envisions the educational issues as being rather larger than mere obstructionist unions and lazy teachers. His Charter School (later renamed the Stansbury School after his death in 2020) is nothing more than an educational Skinner box, driven by behavior modification principles and primed with an orgy of high performance drugs that make sugar candy of the soma from Huxley's futurist world. Well-crafted pharmaceuticals from an early age have turned these nerds into super-nerds, not just intellectual superstars but perfect physical specimens with extraordinary reflexes, fighting skills, and athletic talents. Far from being those eponymous prodigies, Stansbury's students are just carefully screened, first-class druggies who make today's professional sports steroid junkies look like Little Leaguers. Laughably, the new school not only produces a first-year Class of 2009, but 78% of the graduates"were admitted to first-tier Ivy League universities." Now those are some really fast-acting drugs!By 2036, the Stansbury School's faculty and student body have become an international phenomenon, the astonishing source of Senators and Supreme Court judges, corporate CEO's, developers of the gyro technology for flying cars as well as the thermal fingerprinting technology for heat-seeking bullets, and discoverers of cures for AIDS and (imminently) cancer. In fact, the school has been so overwhelmingly successful, it is poised to receive a $1 trillion government grant pending Congressional approval. Ah, but Kalstein's opening pages reveal that something dark and mysterious shadows this great institution as a small handful of less-than-stellar alumni are being assassinated.If the inanity of this setup hasn't already convinced you, suffice to say that the remaining 300 pages lay out an utterly conventional, less-than-stellar action story of the Ludlum/Cussler/Patterson ilk. Good guys in white hats, well-intentioned but supremely naïve leaders, villains so totally evil they can barely control their wax-laden handlebar mustaches (even the females!), unassuming heroes, miraculous conversions to the truth, unexpected inner strengths discovered, irascible, curmudgeonly Senators, mystery drugs, and the like. Occasional pop references to the second coming of Hillary Clinton and the music of The Strokes (Still, in 2036? Heaven help us if they've become the geriatric Rolling Stones prancers of 2036.) don't help.The book cover, actually quite cleverly designed, contains blurbs that reference Bret Easton Ellis's Less than Zero, Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and classic sci-fi author Philip K. Dick. PRODIGY, and Mr. Kalstein, belong in this company about as much as I do. A toss-away beach read, at best.

I really wanted to love this story more than I did. The idea is cool: a sci-fi prep school in the near future where drug regimented post grads are mysteriously being murdered, and two unlikely allies are required to work together to solve it.I was all in, but something about the ending fell flat for me and left a bad aftertaste. I think the problem was everything in this story is superhuman, and the ending is so normal. It almost ruined the whole book for me. I enjoyed the journey, but I won't read it again.

Prodigy is an solid, impressive novel. Kalstein's prose is stylish yet efficient and his characters are richly drawn and sympathetic. Kalstein takes his time early on, but it pays off: Our glimpses of the characters' lives strengthen our connection to them and ensure that we care about their fate, and Kalstein's attention to detail in establishing the story's elaborate future history lends the setting an extra level of versimilitude. And once the plot gathers steam, it's hard to put the book down.Occasionally, the story's fictional world strains credulity, but not where you'd think. The audacious broad strokes, in which Kalstein extrapolates the politics of this new world, ring true. It's the smaller details that sometimes stick out. Is it just a coincidence that all the main characters' favorite literature and music hails from the "late 20th century"? Each time a reference to Kenneth Lonergan or The Strokes or a classic Shelby appears, it's hard to escape the feeling that the author is name-checking his own favorites. And the surprisingly outlandish laser-syringe feeding system, while facilitating an excellent set piece, also seems to create a forgivable yet significant plot hole.In spite of these nitpicks, however, Prodigy remains an engaging read with vivid characters and an entertaining rollercoaster plot, as well as powerful moments of genuine emotional weight.

PRODIGY took such a long while to develop, I almost gave up on it about 1/3 of the way thru - but it is just at that point that the book starts to contain some decent action and become interesting. It is clear that some editor understood this, and had the writer put an action scene (which really belongs in a later part of the book) right at the beginning of the book - otherwise, this book would have been even easier to give up on, very early on.The author does a good job of describing a near-future USA, where a specific school has been given almost carte-blanche to teach/develop the next Einsteins, which an over-populated world needs even more than ever... while the school definately succeeds in developing geniuses - it also succeeds in developing a lot of other "screwed up individuals" - and when the school is up for a $1 trillion dollar grant from the US Govt., there are those that would stop at nothing - even murder - to make sure it happes.Besides the slow opening, the author was also able to sneak in some political propaganda, which would probably have been best to have been left out... for example, his obvious position regarding open immigration.