A visually powerful, angst-ridden and sometimes funny story set in a world of killer DJs and smuggled soul music.
In Gray’s sci-fi/fantasy debut, the highly stratified society of Overtone finds itself torn apart in a fight to channel the Ohm, a ubiquitous but tightly controlled energy source akin to electricity.
Like most young men, Flick dreams of being a Shaper, someone who can literally create new worlds by adeptly joining and mixing musical sounds. To see if he has this ability, he visits the Resident, the Shaper designator, who lives in the center of Overtone. The Resident says nothing significant at their first meeting, yet Flick comes to a much fuller understanding of the scope of his powers when an explosion upsets the flow of Ohm to the grid, unleashing tensions between the privileged people of the Inner Rings and the hardworking citizens of the Outer Rings. Flick begins a wildly imaginative journey that takes him through fights against far more powerful, embittered foes while exposing him to the heartbreak of hero worship and love from afar. Partly a coming-of-age story, partly a detailed exploration of the physics of music and sound waves, Gray’s novel features marvelous passages of sci-fi flight: “[Flick] examined the various shapes and sizes of the sound waves, the way the bold bass throes bounded forward like lumbering whales, or the way the high pitched screams frizzed up like dust motes on a kitchen floor. The tunnel of light and sound throbbed and shifted and echoed.” While the conceit of a world that operates entirely on sound waves and bootleg mixes wears slightly thin over the course of a full-length novel, the enthusiasm with which Gray writes often makes up for the occasionally heavy-handed allusions to a society engaged in class war. Flick’s culture shock and growing awareness of the disparities inherent in a tightly regulated caste system are interspersed with oversize, playful creatures that are half-organic, half-subwoofer. The novel suffers a bit from its worldbuilding; every one of the hero’s actions is colored with outré magnitude. Regardless, Gray’s ability to create a richly imagined universe will delight genre enthusiasts, and his skill bodes well for future efforts.
A visually powerful, angst-ridden and sometimes funny story set in a world of killer DJs and smuggled soul music.Pub Date: May 8, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ohm Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
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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