A relatable protagonist, a believable journey of self-discovery, and a wild SF world.
In this SF sequel, a young woman’s belief that superheroes do more harm than good takes a dark turn.
When Alyssa Henson arrives by taxi to the Pacific Coast city of Olympus, where she’s about to start a job as a dental hygienist, she’s annoyed by the reason traffic is at a standstill. Crowds are staring up at the sky, where superheroes Ultra Woman, Mr. Amazing, and Fantastic Man—collectively known as the Terrific Trio—are battling evil unicorns. The sight of a little girl, whose gawking parents are oblivious to their daughter’s precarious perch on a rail overlooking the ocean, just proves Alyssa’s sincere argument that showboating superheroes make the world more perilous, not less. And what if the increase in supervillainy is directly related to the rise of crime fighters with superpowers? (“No weird creatures ever bothered the Earth before superheroes became a thing,” she’s convinced.) Sherrier’s sequel to his creative YA SF novel The Flying Woman (2018) revisits an imaginative world where contemporary city life gets transformed by alternative dimensions and select human beings’ sudden acquisitions of random, unearthly powers. The author’s world is not only outrageously wacky (supervillain powers are reflected in such names as The Candelabra, The Fish Slayer, and The Looking Glass, and an upside-down dimension is peopled by sentient monkeys), but chillingly dark as well. Innocent people are injured and killed during attacks and battles, deliberately and inadvertently, and archsupervillain Doctor Hades’ torture lab is a nightmare. Yet the sequel is also thoughtfully rooted in the realistic emotional journeys of Alyssa and her friends, some of whom have their own secrets. Alyssa’s estrangement from her parents is all too understandable; so is the fact that dreams unrealized have affected her and her best friend, Miranda. When Alyssa’s painful encounter with a zombie unicorn’s horn gives her the potential to eliminate superpowers from both villains and heroes, leading to a disturbing moral dilemma, she must wrestle with what she is in danger of becoming herself. In the end, how Alyssa fares comes in tandem with the explosive disappearance of a few main characters, a welcome hint that there is more to come for the inhabitants of Sherrier’s Olympus and beyond.
A relatable protagonist, a believable journey of self-discovery, and a wild SF world.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-40144-724-1
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.
Some people are born supervillains, and others have supervillainy thrust upon them.
Charlie Fitzer, a former business journalist–turned–substitute teacher, is broke and somewhat desperate. His circumstances take an unexpected and dangerous turn when his estranged uncle Jake dies, leaving his business—i.e., his trillion-dollar supervillain empire—to Charlie. Charlie doesn’t really have the skills or experience to manage the staff of the volcano lair, and matters don’t improve when he’s pressured to attend a high-level meeting with other supervillains, none of whom got along with his uncle. With the aid of his uncle’s No. 1, Mathilda Morrison, and his cat, Hera (who turns out to be an intelligent and typing-capable spy for his uncle’s organization), Charlie must sort out whom he can trust before he gets blackmailed, blown up, or both. This book serves as a follow-up of sorts to Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022) in that both are riffs on genre film tropes. The current work is fluffier and sillier than the previous novel and, indeed, many of Scalzi’s other books, although there is the occasional jab about governments being in bed with unscrupulous corporate enterprises or the ways in which people can profit from human suffering. This is one of many available stories about a good-hearted Everyman thrust into fantastical circumstances, struggling to survive as a fish out of water, and, while well executed for its type, the plot doesn’t go anywhere that will surprise you.
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780765389220
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
