A lovely, tear-jerking tale of time travel, familial love, and sacrifice.
In this first book in a YA sci-fi series, a grieving teenager goes back in time in a desperate attempt to save her younger brother.
Brooke Wallace is a senior in high school when her brother, Branson, develops a cough that won’t go away. Her family is devastated when he’s diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and dies within four months. Spiraling into depression, Brooke becomes “obsessed with the idea that I wasn’t living the life set for my soul”; soon, she decides to set things right by taking her government-approved trip back into her own past. In this near-future setting, all citizens get one free chance to relive part of their lives—however, time travelers are under strict orders not to do things differently and risk changing not only their timelines, but those of others. Yet Brooke feels sure that she can keep Branson alive without altering much else. With her parents’ blessing and secret research help from her brother’s doctor, she’s transported to a point months before Branson’s death. She’ll make a total of three trips as she struggles to figure out why Branson got sick—was it the cream for a skin rash or asbestos in an attic?—and keep him away from the cause. When her first attempt fails, she uses her mother’s trip. This go-round, she’s sure Branson’s escaped and strikes up a relationship with a boy named Charlie Johnson; then her brother starts coughing again, and when Brooke returns to her present, he’s still dead, her parents have separated, and she’s broken Charlie’s heart. Will Brooke ever be able to move on from Branson’s death? Or will she lose her life trying to save his? This poignant, well-written story puts mortality—and readers’ reactions to it—front and center. Brooke muses at the beginning of the tale: “The first time Branson died, the ‘original’ time, as I would come to refer to it, I almost died with him. Not literally, but figuratively. My soul broke into a thousand tiny pieces I didn’t think I would ever be able to put back together well enough to sustain a normal existence.” As Jahn (Let Them Burn Cake!, 2015, etc.) takes Brooke through the same events multiple times, the author explores how small changes can snowball into huge ones and how attitudes can influence, if not overcome, tragedy.
A lovely, tear-jerking tale of time travel, familial love, and sacrifice.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-76496-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: BermLord
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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