An admirable diversion into alternative history and humanity’s inherent nature that plays to the author’s strengths.
A trio of government-engineered superheroes navigate a war-torn, divided nation: the United States of America.
Gallagher debuted with a savagely funny memoir (Kaboom, 2010, etc.) and followed it up with a novel, Youngblood (2016). Here, he pivots to an alternate version of America that’s just recognizable but radically different due to a few twists in history. In this present, the U.S. won the Vietnam War, but chaos still reigns in the streets of the country 30 years later, wracked by seemingly unending wars overseas and terrorist violence at home on the part of extremist groups who oppose the administration’s authoritarian approach to most issues, especially domestic policies. The aforementioned superbeings, created with space rocks called cythrax, are Peter Swenson, able to turn invisible; Grady Flowers, whose superstrength belies his vigilant nature; and Jean-Jacques Saint-Preux, a man granted Flash-like speed but unable to run back to his beloved war. They’re impatiently waiting for orders in Empire City, an expanded version of New York. Our everyday characters are Sebastian Rios, an unremarkable bureaucrat infamous for being kidnapped in the Middle East, and his childhood friend Mia Tucker, who participated in the special forces raid that freed him. As you might expect, there are dubious characters too, including fugitive freedom fighter Jonah Gray, who is using his guerrilla faction, the Mayday Front, to terrorize Empire City, and Maj. Gen. Jackie “Jackpot” Collins, a fiercely pro-war presidential candidate who may not have the country’s best interests at heart. Gallagher’s prose is more elaborate than in his previous work, and because he doesn’t spoon-feed readers the plot, they may find themselves pushing pins in a conspiracy board, Watchmen-style, to follow along. That said, there’s a lot to take in here, including acute explorations of America’s current political and ideological divisions, the heavy responsibility superheroes would be forced to shoulder in real life, and a keen extrapolation of a country launched down a radically altered historical continuum.
An admirable diversion into alternative history and humanity’s inherent nature that plays to the author’s strengths.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7779-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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