A Highly Unlikely Scenario, or a Neetsa Pizza Employee's Guide to Saving the World: A Novel
Global fast-food franchises rule the world, spawning contentious sects. Leonard, for instance, the hapless hero in first-time novelist Cantor’s rambunctiously smart, pun-spiked, and sweet dystopian romantic comedy, works for Neetsa Pizza fielding customer complaints and is, therefore, a Pythagorean. His sister, Carol, serves Scottish tapas at Jack-’o-Bites, which means she should be a Jacobite. Instead, she’s a neo-Maoist, always slipping off to “book club,” code for various revolutionary actions, leaving her gifted son, Felix, with doting Leonard. But once Leonard finds himself on the phone with Marco Polo, time, space, and the status quo begin to seriously warp. Soon Leonard, Felix, and Sally, a fetching “Book Guide” at the university library, are sent on an urgent, cosmic quest back to Marco’s era, a mission involving two other thirteenth-century renegades, the English  philosopher Roger Bacon and the prophetic Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia. Glimmering with “signs and wonders” and laced with satirical jabs at technological intrusiveness and deception, Cantor’s funny and charming metaphysical adventure and love story is a wily inquiry into questions of perception, knowledge, mystery, legacy, and love. --Donna Seaman