A bleak, timely, and painstakingly imagined exploration of a future that none of us want.
Four generations of Scots labor—on Earth and Mars—to save humanity from the climate crisis.
It’s 2025, and Hannah, a frustrated young fusion scientist vacationing in Scotland’s Western Isles, is visited by a disfigured young man who was born in a colony on Mars and has come back from the future to help her perfect fusion technology in time to save Earth from runaway climate change and civilizational collapse. Now it’s the 2070s and Hannah’s son, Andrew, has become one of Scotland’s leading political figures by fighting against billionaire futurists and arguing that society has “the means to save ourselves… if we work together.” Yet his daughter, Kenzie, is building on her dead grandmother’s unfinished research to construct a fusion reactor for the Tevat Corporation, which has given up on the planet and intends to evacuate its Shareholders (wealthy investors, corrupt politicians, and useful scientists like Kenzie) to Mars. Now it’s 2103 and Kenzie’s son, Roban, who lives with the painful physical disabilities experienced by the first generation of humans born in the Corporation’s frighteningly totalitarian Colony, is learning to function with the assistance of a mechanical exoskeleton—and to gradually distrust the Corporation’s vision for a better future. Can Kenzie build the reactor her grandmother first theorized? Can Andrew convince his daughter to labor toward a better future on Earth rather than off it? Can Andrew’s political career survive Kenzie’s plans to abandon Earth and its people? Can Roban find a way to communicate his mother’s fusion discoveries to his long-dead grandmother before it’s too late? Is “the alteration of the past by the future” even possible? Dancing between decades, characters, and planets, Reed’s latest may lack some of the lyrical beauty that marked his previous two books, but it succeeds in brilliantly dramatizing some of the great questions of our time. Can we technologize our way out of the climate crisis or should we instead focus our energies on collaboratively solving the problem with the tools we have? Is Earth our only viable planetary home or can we adequately replicate its richness elsewhere? If the latter, who will get to go? And what fate awaits those left behind? And is the future worth living for those who manage to leave?
A bleak, timely, and painstakingly imagined exploration of a future that none of us want.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781324079378
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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