A spirited cast brightens this gripping, densely packed dystopian tale.
Fragoules’ debut SF novel spotlights remarkable individuals who fight totalitarian rule in a near-future world.
Eighteen-year-old Haven Segreti was born into a dystopian future America. It’s been two decades since a string of disasters—including starvation, disease, and economic collapse—ravaged the country. Haven works as an Assimilation Administrator in the New Republic, which comprises the territory east of the Mississippi River. She processes “outsiders” joining the New Republic’s walled cities. Living in these cities is the only way to get any assistance from a government that demands conformity. Haven considers this a draconian means to control its citizens, a belief that she shares with her charismatic team leader, Adrien Damaso. He’s also the person Haven suspects when someone brutally murders an administrative leader. In Texas, outside of the New Republic’s borders, Nathan Hambrice awakens from a 20-year coma to a “bizarre alternate world.” He’s just as shocked to learn that he has a son living in the east, a revelation that ultimately sends Nathan on a potentially dangerous journey. The author excels at worldbuilding. Front-loading the narrative with exposition gives the story an unrushed tempo; Fragoules favors character development over action, and she meticulously assembles a complex cast. Adrien, for one, is magnetic but unnerving, confessing, “Emotions are an intellectual curiosity for me. My joys come from…darker things.” There’s a propulsive narrative drive as Nathan goes after his son and Haven and her friends fight to free themselves of the New Republic’s authority. This novel, which rolls out a prospective series, leaves much to explore for sequels and hints at expansion, as the former United States isn’t the only region in turmoil.
A spirited cast brightens this gripping, densely packed dystopian tale.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780998740355
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2023
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
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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