A novel about a scheming president offers an excellent read for those who love thrillers or 21st-century history.
In this dystopian sequel, the Underground races to expose a secret surveillance program before the Enemy’s final blow.
The Enemy has bombarded the Capital with airstrikes. The man known as Seven, who once worked for the government’s Elite Guard as Agent Jon Wyle, has evacuated the city with damning information on a flash drive. He aims to prove that President William Drake, his surveillance-obsessed administration, and the fearmongering Church want nothing less than complete control over the nation’s populace. He ends up sharing a car with a woman named Talia, and they head for Loganville, to her brother Shaan’s home. Naturally, Elite Guard Agent Eve Parker—Jon’s fiancee—remains on Seven’s trail. Seven and his cohorts narrowly escape into the arms of Daniel Alexander Young Jr. and the Underground, the freethinking “Heretics” battling the nation’s enforced division. As Young plans to expose the executive branch as corrupt, Drake uses the Capital attack to announce Patriot ID, a chip-based (and mind-invading) program that will “quickly separate the Heretics from the Patriots.” Then the Enemy contacts the Underground, claiming a too-good-to-be-true desire for a joint effort in taking down Drake. Do Seven and Young dare use the Enemy’s firepower to ignite revolution in cities across the country? In this sequel, Bender (We, the Watched, 2013, etc.) further filters the chaos of the George W. Bush presidency through a gripping dystopian narrative. At one point, Young explains, “We have four branches of government: executive, legislative, judicial, and the Church.” Bender expertly fleshes out Eve and Jon’s relationship through flashbacks. These scenes help fully realize the evolution of his characters’ hearts and minds as the moral terrain worsens. There are even critiques of U.S. empire building, as when Seven asks, “How can we be so sure that,” once the Enemy has defeated Drake, it won’t be “just as controlling as the Guard?” Overall, the author keeps the narrative fluid, never bogging it down in extended battle sequences or windy polemics. Bender’s sequel is a worthy delivery on the promise of his riveting debut.
A novel about a scheming president offers an excellent read for those who love thrillers or 21st-century history.Pub Date: May 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4954-9212-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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