Superior storytelling propels a familiar post-apocalypse, sci-fi premise.
In a blighted, savage, and fascistic New America of the late 21st century, a former fighter tries to escort his children cross-country to a supposed safe haven in California.
In this debut novel, sharp, descriptive prose reveals a nightmarish profile of a United States of the 2070s and ’80s. A corporate-corrupted Washington, D.C., turned the United States into a pariah nation, leading to a coup and takeover of the country by military-industrialist tycoon Nathan Atwell. He is a born-again megalomaniac who believes in his divine destiny as ruler; to that end, he tags the blood of the downtrodden populace with nanotechnology and occupies his near-feudal surveillance state with Star Wars–esque, masked “Secan” storm troopers. He also carries out selective eugenics with every girl of breeding age, and when Secans come for the adolescent daughter of obscure prole John Bradford, it leads to the marauders getting shot and the household on the run. Turns out Bradford is a legendary warrior, retired undefeated from “the Circuit,” barnstorming gladiatorial death bouts masterminded by crime lord Irish Ben of the unconquered outlaw metropolis of Chicago. Bradford reluctantly renews his business relationship with the vicious Irish Ben to literally fight his way across the country, seeking to take his two kids (and dog) to a presumed refuge in free California. Bacci is a screenwriter, and his dystopian actioner (the first in a trilogy) combines the more cinematic elements of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games but raises the violence to near-splatterpunk level. The Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome–type brawls are described in bone-crunching detail. But it’s Bacci’s gift for empathy, in his evocation of the despair at the root of this brute society, that steers the material more toward Mel Gibson Saves His Family than Arnold Schwarzenegger Swats the Mutants. Each is a formula, but at least this one is more about “we” than the World Wrestling Entertainment.
Superior storytelling propels a familiar post-apocalypse, sci-fi premise.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Prepper Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2016
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
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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