An immersive, layered, and extensively developed space opera.
A trade officer navigates the tensions between his remote outpost and the rest of the galaxy in Meierz’s second SF novel in a series.
Albert St. John Rembrandt, “Bertie” to his friends, is the youngest son of the Duke of New Norfolk and scion to a pharmaceutical fortune back on his home planet of Britannia. He’s also the stationmaster at the orbital trade station above the planet Tolar—a world that recently emerged from millennia of isolation to sell its red dye and opals to merchants from the Interstellar Trade Alliance. He’s already made friends with the ruler of the planet’s equatorial Monralar province, a nameless man known only as the Monral. When two emissaries from Earth arrive, requesting to visit Monralar, Bertie sees it as an opportunity to get away from his station for a few days and visit with the Monral and his 5-year-old daughter, Farryneth. He soon realizes, however, that the emissaries are members of the Di Fata Johnson family—longtime rivals of the Rembrandts who’ve come looking for Laura, a relative who defected to Tolar decades ago (she happens to be someone whom Bertie knows well). It also turns out that the Johnsons are interested in acquiring and replicating a rejuvenating Tolari elixir, known as “Jorann’s blessing,” which prolongs youth and grants empathetic powers. Every human who lives on Tolar has taken it except for Bertie, who fears bonding himself to the Tolari. He’s torn between his wish to protect Tolar from outside exploitation and his desire to get in the good graces of his family, who also wish to profit off the blessing.
Over the course of this outer-space tale, Meierz offers readers vividly descriptive prose; it’s a fun mix of futuristic invention and digs at aspects of Earth society, as when Bertie considers the two Johnson guests from his home world: “He stifled a grin at the thought of these gentlemen living for several days with the crew of the Kekrax trade ship they’d taken to get here. As citizens of the Commonwealth of Boston, a bastion of Earth prudery, they had likely been utterly mortified by the indignities and embarrassments inflicted on them by the inquisitive little reptilians.” The multilingual, tea-loving Bertie proves to be a pleasantly idiosyncratic protagonist, and readers will find that getting to know the ways in which he operates is one of the novel’s greatest pleasures. There is also plenty of Dune-style space diplomacy—rival houses, trade disputes, and so on—to please diehard SF/fantasy fans, but beneath this veneer, the author tells a simple story of exile, the meaning of home, and the creation of a chosen family. The book is the fifth that Meierz has set in this fictional world and the second in the Exiles of the Drift series, and as a result, there’s a lot of mythology to catch up on. However, readers who are already familiar with this milieu will appreciate this thoughtful, often emotional contribution.
An immersive, layered, and extensively developed space opera.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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