Saving Luke

Seven months after the release of Rebirth, the first chapter that enchanted and catapulted us into a new adventure undertaken by the authors Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle, Saving Luke, the second awaited book of The Pretender world is finally here. The story follows from what was narrated in Rebirth. Jarod is looking for answers about an imminent terrorist attack and he must thwart it without endangering young Luke’s life, whose father is being threatened to cooperate with the abductors if he wants to see his son ever again. The chameleon is also willing to help his fascinating companion Skylar to detox after the forced permanence at Dr. Bilson’s clinic, where Jarod had been pretending to be a doctor to interrogate Kaj, Luke’s kidnapper. In addition, the runaway pretender is more than ever longing to have answers about his identity, and to find them he doesn’t hesitate to stay in touch with his former protector Sydney who is struggling with a crisis of conscience after Jarod’s escape and yearning to help his protégé to pay off debt for his past mistakes. If that isn’t enough, Miss Parker is always hot on the heels of Jarod, helped by a team composed by the sweet Daphne, whose idol is the Ice Princess herself, and the creepy Cornelius, narcissist and ambitious young genius, selfish lover of his own intelligence to the limits of excess. In an extraordinary succession of events, Jarod finds himself in a rush to manage all the aspects of his existence. The pretender takes a long road that leads him to face his past, present and future, finding fear, anguish and sufferance on his way, but also friendship, love and new discoveries. The adult Jarod approaches life as a young boy experimenting the world for the first time, is it to taste cotton candy or loving a woman. But Jarod’s distinctive feature is always his superior intellect that puts him in the condition to face the bad guys and try to save Luke – and hundreds of people with him. Meanwhile, Miss Parker is more and more tormented by the memories of a young girl who doesn’t exist anymore. She’s back to do one job: Chase Jarod and return him to the Centre. But this assignment puts her vis-à-vis with an agonizing challenge: Defying her emotions and all the feelings she has for him. During the pursuit, specially at those moments when the huntress is in very close contact with her prey, those feelings come to the surface, described in a whole new way, filled with tension and unresolved emotional conflicts. Perhaps the bond between Jarod and Miss Parker is more obvious in Saving Luke than it ever was during the show, also thanks to new revelations on their shared childhood. Not to alarm all the fans of the couple, it must be said that the presence of another woman in Jarod’s life might annoy all of us waiting for a happy ending to this UST, but at the same time it’s finding out about Skylar that exasperate Miss Parker to the point of becoming jealous. So it’s also because of the ‘other woman’ if emotions resurface and Miss Parker feels something for the fleeing ‘monster’, something she didn’t think she still had inside her. To all the fans of the show still waiting for a reconciliation of this wonderful couple, I say: Read Saving Luke in one breath, and you’ll realize it was worth it. The book is nice and writing is fluid. Reading Saving Luke was easy and satisfying. The form was improved compared with the first book, and the authors were certainly aided by the fact that a group of trusty ‘proofreaders’ (many of which recognizable among the fans of the show) helped with the final editing. To express their total devotion to those fans who clung on to The Pretender world even when the fandom was falling into oblivion, the authors included a large group of secondary characters named precisely like those fans. By doing so, Steven and Craig are pushing the concept of relationship between authors and end-users of a fandom to an integration and cooperation levels never seen before. If the plot in Rebirth was basically a reinterpretation of the Pilot of the tv show, Saving Luke is a completely different story. After reading the book it’s pretty obvious that scenes coming directly from episodes of the show are missing, and if there are any references to specific moments of the first season they have been totally revised, even the dialogues – to the delight of the fans, who are finally able to read fresh Parkerisms and Jarodisms. This choice allows Saving Luke to be much more interesting and addictive than Rebirth. Rebirth bad habit to combine the TV past and the literary present would annoy the long-standing fans and confuse the new readers. With the second chapter a whole different way forward is recognizable: Laying the foundations, then departing from the original TV show. The result is a path that will probably lead towards the same direction, but by following a different route. As a first hour fan, I can say that I’m really satisfied with the breath of fresh hair provided by Saving Luke, with the new scenes and the new characters, always very well detailed. Following the rule that a good team shouldn’t change, Steven and Craig maintained all the main characters alike, with their traumas, physical description, behavior and personal life. What changes, are the means to reach the main goal. Jarod is still looking for his family, but he gets information about his past in a different way. Miss Parker still wants to know the truth about her mother’s death, but Jarod gives it to her differently. Sydney is still in pain for the pretender’s escape and feels responsible for stealing his life, but he’s also struggling with the guilt for his wife and son’s death (characters never mentioned during the show). The lack of some main characters (Broots, Lyle, Angelo and Raines) is much evident and undeniable. You must be patient though, and be careful while reading, because among those lines you may find Easter eggs aimed to tell us that their absence might be only temporary… Saving Luke is a perfect union of what the TV show lovers appreciated the most in the series and something wonderfully new that modernized not only the characters, but also the narrated themes. In the show, Jarod is kidnapped in 1963 and runs from the Centre in 1996, he is 36/37 (his birth date is still unknown). In the “new” pretender, Jarod is abducted in 1983 and escapes in 2013, so the characters are still the same age, but they are suddenly thrown into a more contemporary era, at least for what concerns technologies. If in the show Jarod used red notebooks, today he has a tablet; if he used a huge medicine textbook to learn how to pretend to be a doctor, today it is enough to watch videos on YouTube, let alone the continuous mentioning of Google, Wikipedia, actual singers… All that goes pretty well with a character that became more shrewd and aware of his own potential. While the TV-Jarod was definitely timid and almost clumsy in his attitude, the written-Jarod is much more violent and determined, even cruel at times. With his omnipresent weird sense of justice, employed in an exquisitely arbitrary way, Jarod reminds us of Michael Westen in Burn Notice (whose main features certainly retraced the pretender’s one), a ‘Robin Hood of our times’ helping the little guy to outwit the bad guys. But if in the show Jarod did it in a more theatrical way, in Saving Luke his method of persuasion reaches more exasperated levels of physical and psychological torture. At the same time, we are dealing with a more dynamic Jarod, using advanced technological gadgets to accomplish amazing and almost unrealistic missions, like Sydney Bristow used to do in Alias. Whether it is jumping off a plane to ‘catch a train’ or putting electro-magnets in his gloves and boots to lock on the train roof, this Jarod seems to have acquired also a tactical mind that has nothing to envy to Ethan Hunt’s (Mission: Impossible). Take the TV-Jarod, add a little bit of Michael Westen’s determination, a bunch of Ethan Hunt’s unbelievable action sequences, a handful of Sydney Bristow’s disguising techniques, mix them up and the result is a brand new Jarod. A swirling cocktail of unprecedented adrenaline that doesn’t divert attention from the main news: the TV show becomes a book, reinventing itself – and it does it pretty well. Now the authors have the difficult task to continue Jarod’s saga in the best possible way, maybe also by providing the lifetime fans with a series of answers to still unresolved issues, without omitting the narrative necessity to keep them waiting with bated breath until the very end of the race.