An imaginative sci-fi survival tale built around a cautionary, uncompromising war story.
A young woman finds refuge in an underground bunker during a nuclear war and then emerges to live on the ruined Earth in this post-apocalyptic novel.
Tanya Gray is about to start graduate school, but a dire warning arrives in a phone call from her dad. World War III has started, and the world’s nuclear powers have begun annihilating civilization. Tanya flees in her car, and then begs to be taken into an armored military vehicle. It deposits her at the Crystal Temple, an underground shelter that houses about 2,000 survivors, one of six operational structures in the United States. Run by the iron-fisted Gen. Douglas Pierce, the Crystal Temple is a comfortable and organized facility under military rule. Tanya is assigned kitchen and nursing duties, and soon begins seeing a guy named Jack Mitchell. Some thugs try to rape Tanya, but she defends herself against the brutal attack, and the perpetrators are tried and executed in a public hanging. Impressed by Tanya, Pierce gives her an intelligence job, reporting on possible traitors inside the community. While the nuclear winter kills scores of people above ground, a plot against the tyrannical Pierce is brewing, in part because the chief medical officer, Dr. Nathan Herring, is conducting bizarre experiments on survivors. Tanya and Jack are banished to the surface after their involvement in the plot is exposed, and there the effects of radiation sickness soon take hold. People now share the planet with panthers, humans who have evolved, thanks to a glowing tree, into 7-foot-tall creatures that are immune to radiation poisoning. Tanya finds that the panthers may hold the key to saving humanity in the midst of an ongoing world war. Crane’s (Makers of Destiny, 2017, etc.) nuclear holocaust novel is a sweeping political tale, full of both personal and international conflicts, while digging into some deeper questions about society and what it means to be human. Tanya is a savvy, intelligent protagonist with plenty of initiative and enough emotional capacity to love, even in the face of catastrophe. The reassuring and then sinister reality inside the Crystal Temple is characterized in a plausible manner. But while the fantasy elements in the second half of the book are intriguing, they are weakened by some overwriting and the invention of a convenient miracle serum.
An imaginative sci-fi survival tale built around a cautionary, uncompromising war story.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Foremost Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2017
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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