Superlative characters enliven this richly detailed historical adventure.
Modern-day siblings travel back through time to war-torn, Nazi-occupied Poland in Elle’s debut SF novel.
Twenty-two-year-old Blanca Hernandez and her younger brother, Mateo, tour the Texas college Mateo will soon be attending. An apparent earthquake suddenly hits, followed by an explosion. When the smoke clears, Blanca, Mateo, and other bystanders find themselves in another place altogether—1943 Poland, to be precise. Scientists at the college had been working on a project creating “time jumps” that went awry, and now the siblings are collateral damage, caught in the midst of an ongoing war. They’re soon dodging Nazis, vicious wildlife, and explosives dropped from above. They manage to connect with stranded, English-speaking German pilot Otto Zimmler, who can help them navigate the unfamiliar landscape. All Blanca and Mateo want is to make it to the coast, where a boat can take them to safety. While they’re under the threat of both German and Russian soldiers, they struggle to keep their fascinating origin a secret. The author wisely keeps the time-travel details simple and doesn’t unnecessarily complicate the story of heroes under fire. The remarkable cast drives the narrative: Eye-opening flashbacks highlight Blanca’s tumultuous past as a combat medic in Afghanistan and humanize Otto as the reader witnesses a loathsome ideology enshroud his youth (“…a soldier proudly brandished a red flag with a twisted black symbol in the middle. Otto was too young to know what it was, but it impressed him as much as anything had impressed him in his life”). Nazism is the indisputable villain here, but this is also a story of survival, and Elle fills her swiftly-paced tale with harrowing scenes that, sadly, not every character walks away from. Fortunately, lighter moments occasionally alleviate the grim tone; it’s amusing to see the travelers frequently refer to Mateo’s just-purchased college history book to get background on the era. The final act is a surprising, gleefully frenzied ride to the end.
Superlative characters enliven this richly detailed historical adventure.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781956452457
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Arts Ink Ltd DBACentral Park South
Review Posted Online: March 29, 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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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