A well-written political romance that reflects the growing dangers in our social divisions.
Two men on opposite sides of a bitter conflict find unexpected love in Patrick’s novel.
In the near-future United States, Daniel Ridley has grown up isolated in his Christian Evangelical bubble and been fed lies about the world. He and his friend Marcus are sent to Boston on two different missions. The first is to proselytize and bring people into their religion; the second is the much darker task of trying to find an individual who, they have been told, is responsible for kidnapping and murder. As Daniel and Marcus set about their work, they learn more about the real world and other people’s lives. One of the first people they meet in Boston is Jaxtyn Keller, a Buddhist gay man confident in his sexuality and worldview who is committed to hearing out different perspectives. Jaxtyn’s handsome appearance triggers Daniel’s struggle with same-sex attraction, and the missionary keeps finding reasons to spend time with the Buddhist. Daniel’s intense personality draws Jaxtyn into becoming closer with him, despite Daniel’s insistence that they are sinners and must seek God’s forgiveness. Meanwhile, Jaxtyn’s friend Skylar has become involved in a group calling themselves the New Riders whose members risk their safety by going into unfriendly territory to give queer youth useful information. Daniel’s secret mission and Skylar’s activism will lead to a series of violent encounters no one is braced for. Patrick has envisioned a convincing future for the United States in which the federal government doesn’t regulate or restrain state governments’ religious extremism or racist policies (“Even here in New England, the religious fundamentalists were gaining a solid foothold”). Daniel and Jaxtyn are realistic characters with complex personalities—particularly Daniel, who has a distinct and recognizable arc; he begins as a very repressed character with a narrow view of the world, and over the course of the book (mainly through his conversations with Jaxtyn and Marcus) he finds a different light to follow.
A well-written political romance that reflects the growing dangers in our social divisions.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781648908095
Page Count: 395
Publisher: NineStar Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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