Offbeat global-warming sci-fi that taps the spirit of cowboy romances instead of the usual dystopianism.
In a future wracked by floods and social upheaval, a widower tries to make a new life for himself and his daughter when the continent of Antarctica is thrown open to settlement in Lanning’s (A Spider Sat Beside Her, 2017) second book in a planned trilogy.
Climate change has gone unremedied by greedy corporate interests, causing rising sea levels and mass flooding in the United States. The superrich live in well-guarded enclaves while crime is rampant in the rest of America. Such crime claimed the life of the wife of John Barrous, a former corporate worker who’s now disenchanted by the system. He takes his adolescent daughter with him to a place where one might create a functioning, free-market democracy: Antarctica. Global warming has made it habitable and arable, and the United Nations allows a sanctioned, if dangerous, “land rush” for aspiring farmer-settlers, much like Oklahoma in the Old West. In the mostly wide-open frontier, where outlaws and stampedes are real dangers, John stakes a claim and finds a potential love interest in Lowry Walker, a strong-willed woman with a painful past who’s equally determined to keep Antarctica free of mega-capitalist exploitation. With little alteration, this story could well have been set in pioneer days. Instead of a rapacious railroad baron, there’s Napoleon-admiring villain Lorenzo Durant, complete with a robotic horse; he’s an oligarch intent on selling the nascent nation out to corrupt Russian interests. References to melted ice caps, politics, and a multicultural supporting cast keeps the narrative feeling current, but underneath, it’s an emotional, retro-feeling prairie romance in which the two homesteader leads circle each other but just can’t commit, like folks in a country-and-western ballad. It may be a mixed bag for sci-fi fans expecting epic hard science, spectacular worldbuilding, cool technology, and mind-blowing concepts instead of achy-breaky hearts trying to do right in a new heartland. But the oater atmosphere is rendered without genre self-consciousness, unlike Andre Norton’s Beast Master series, for example. Here, the comfortable Wild West formula, sure pacing, and sympathetic protagonists take well to the Antarctic topsoil.
Offbeat global-warming sci-fi that taps the spirit of cowboy romances instead of the usual dystopianism.Pub Date: April 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991210-2-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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