An entertaining, if occasionally slow, read for fans of the paranormal and fantasy genres.
In Snizek’s (Secret of the Shielded, 2014, etc.) latest YA fantasy, a 16-year-old looking for ways to reinvent herself finds out that she’s a genetic hybrid.
Eris Payton is an ordinary teenage girl…almost. Her whole life, she’s felt awkward and friendless, as she and her mother are constantly moving from place to place. Her misery is compounded by the fact that her dad left the family when she was little and her mom is an abusive drinker and drug abuser. One day, Eris sees a mysterious boy in a convenience store—a boy that no one else can see. At first she thinks he’s a ghost, but the truth turns out to be even stranger: he’s actually two beings combined. One of them is Matt, a human who disappeared a while ago; the other is Nelson, an electric being called a lucent, who’s able to join with humans in a kind of symbiosis. When Matt ran away from home and nearly died, the lucent joined with him to save his life, and now the two exist as one being. Nelson tells Eris that a virus has been killing lucents, but he was told that she could help—although he doesn’t know how. It all sounds crazy to Eris, but after a particularly bad night at home, she decides to go with Nelson to his underground community. It turns out that something in her blood might hold the cure to the lucent virus; she also aims to finally find out what happened to her dad, who genetically engineered her before her birth. Snizek creates an engaging world in her portrayal of the lucent community. The book is sometimes slow-paced, however, and there are occasional flashes of other popular YA novels: for example, lucents have skin that glows in the sunlight (à la Twilight), and they must undergo an aptitude test to learn to control their flow of electricity. However, the romance between Eris and Nelson is sweet and believable. Eris herself is a likable protagonist who always comes across as smart and capable, even when she doesn’t understand the new world she’s discovered.
An entertaining, if occasionally slow, read for fans of the paranormal and fantasy genres.Pub Date: March 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4823-5141-5
Page Count: 186
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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