A hopeful, wide-ranging exploration of loss, love, and salvation.
A 70-year-old failed businessman is chosen to act as humanity’s spokesperson to a race of benevolent aliens in Harary’s SF novel.
Jonathan “JT” Tuckerman is estranged from his adult children. He lost his first wife in a car crash (which was his fault) and is acrimoniously divorced from his second. He has business debts. On his 70th birthday, JT sets out to drown himself in the ocean off Malibu, California. This, however, is the day the alien “Benevolents” reveal themselves to humanity. They rescue JT and fly him in their spaceship to Dodger Stadium, proclaiming him their representative on Earth. JT is to liaise with world leaders and interest groups and meet monthly with the 7-foot-tall male alien Jorthon and his 6-foot-tall female counterpart, Kalyssa, to request their help in solving problems that plague the world. JT is given an office at the United Nations. He and his team petition the Benevolents to eliminate a host of social ills, and the aliens intercede in each case. People worldwide hail JT as their savior, and the future looks bright for everybody. But what will happen when a second, less friendly race of aliens comes calling? The author’s prose is workmanlike but functions effectively to tell a multilayered story. Jorthon and Kalyssa’s interventions smack of childish wish fulfilment—some of their solutions are naïve, and little thought is given to the chaos of instantly transitioning to a world free of hunger and war—but Harary nonetheless succeeds in highlighting the issues in question. JT is not especially likable (“Interminably unfulfilled, JT was the survivor of a traumatic existence which held no joy for him”), and few readers will judge him worthy of adulation, but the turnaround in his fortunes suggests that there is hope for everybody. One important facet of the novel is the way the author extends JT’s team’s scope to countries and problems beyond the United States, presenting a diversity of religions, ethnicities, and genders. While individual characters don’t always act or speak in particularly distinctive ways, the spirit of togetherness and inclusivity lends additional appeal to JT’s journey.
A hopeful, wide-ranging exploration of loss, love, and salvation.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781958727027
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Genius Book Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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