A brisk, compelling thriller about heroic young people fighting the greatest of evils.
A supernaturally tinged YA adventure novel that’s set against the backdrop of the Apocalypse.
Wirth’s (An Unlikely Season, 2017, etc.) novel features a cast of seemingly ordinary California teens: 17-year-old Melissa Jenkins; Gabriel Rucker, who’s the same age, and a star quarterback on the high school football team; his stepbrothers Michael and Aaron; and their friends Daniel and Donnie Conan. A huge, ominous storm is brewing over the West Coast of the United States, leading TV commentators to reference the end of the world. Unbeknownst to any of these characters, Jonas Smith—a scientist code-named “Scarecrow” who works at a secret facility called the Serenity Institute, for a mysterious figure known as “Monarch”—is perfecting a process that essentially turns people into living zombies, whom the institute can control in any way it sees fit. At first, the worlds of the institute and the teens seem totally unconnected. But as the fast-paced narrative progresses, the young people become more deeply involved in the Serenity Institute’s work—particularly when Michael is sent there to remedy his anti-social behavior, and apparently falls prey to Scarecrow’s illicit procedures. This lean and involving adventure tale, at its best, brings to mind the work of Stephen King (who recently published a very different novel titled The Institute) and Dean R. Koontz, but it’s squarely aimed at a YA audience. It’s also steeped in religious imagery and ideas; indeed, the storm in the background is just one of many physical manifestations of the Christian end times: “I think that angels watch over us—the chosen ones at least,” muses one character, once the novel’s action takes off. “The angels give us signals and messages, and if we listen and pay attention to the messages, good things will happen.” It’s not for nothing that Scarecrow thinks, “Have I sold my soul?” As the cast of teens runs afoul of the institute and its garish minions, Wirth handles the requisite chases very effectively. Indeed, at times, the book brings to mind a smooth combination of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and Left Behind.
A brisk, compelling thriller about heroic young people fighting the greatest of evils.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 251
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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