An accomplished and emotionally complex interplanetary tale.
While searching off-world for their absent father, two siblings are arrested and sentenced to brutal labor in Mallery’s SF novel.
Twenty-year-old Cade Carpenter and 18-year-old Claire Carpenter live on Arenaria, a dusty mining planet within the Realm—a conglomerate of hundreds of inhabited worlds whose shared criminal justice system divides the populace into ’zens (law-abiding citizens kept healthy by nanite implants) and 24s (an indentured workforce—mostly convicted felons—whose lowly status is signified by yellow wrist implants). Cade struggles with guilt over the death-by-misadventure of his first and only girlfriend; Claire has been hanging out with 24s and has become addicted to synth, a powdered drug that comes in different colors and mental “flavors.” After a synth dealer attacks, their mother winds up in a coma; soon afterward, the siblings learn that their father, whom they thought was long dead, may still be alive. They travel to Casmiri, a decadent and seedy tourist world, where they attempt to book passage to Tēleos—an illicit destination where they’ll be free from the Realm’s governance. The authorities catch and convict them, however, and they both become 24s. Cade is sent to the mines in the asteroid belts surrounding Casmiri, and Claire is put to work in a club/brothel in Casmiri’s Lantern District.Can they escape and reunite with their father? Mallery’s assured prose alternates between the third-person perspectives of Cade and Claire, who contrast well with each other: He’s a sensible, responsible, and protective big brother, while she’s an impetuous tearaway whose addictive tendencies and sense of denial are balanced by a blazing sense of justice. Mallery’s worldbuilding is so deftly executed that occasional expository “intertext” chapters sometimes prove redundant. As in the best SF stories, the world’s technological elements allow for social commentary that hits close to home. Claire and Cade’s quest is absorbing in its own right, but its undercurrents of corruption and exploitation evoke real-world visions of refugees desperate to start new lives in far-off countries. The siblings’ situation unravels quickly, but the story moves with some urgency toward a satisfying, self-contained denouement.
An accomplished and emotionally complex interplanetary tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2024
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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