A wild galactic series entry that successfully remains grounded in heartfelt emotion.
The latest installment of Hickman’s space opera finds the teenage title character facing some big life challenges—not the least of which involves saving the galaxy.
Richard, an Ohio teen who was plucked off Earth by aliens and put in charge of the entire Milky Way, has a lot on his plate. After narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, he’s now tasked with quelling escalating tensions between humans and nonhumans all over the star system. He’s also contending with an extended family of anthropomorphic foxes and their intra-pack politics on the planet Beowulf. Amber, who’s one of those foxes and Richard’s wife, admonishes him for tossing out Earth colloquialisms. Richard’s son with Amber, Little Raider, is having a hard time trying to prove his mettle by chasing down prey in the woods with his Uncle Raider, only to realize he’s too squeamish to do what’s expected. Attempting to flee his shame, Little Raider falls in with assassin foxes whom Richard thinks would make great additions to the military forces on his adopted home world of Krel. Meanwhile, Sen. Spartacus and his five-times-great-grandmother continue their villainous quest to kill or kidnap Richard and his loved ones. Heads roll, constantly—Beowulf foxes carry sharp swords. Meanwhile, Richard and Amber possess magical blue energy and can heal loads of trauma, although their powers are supposed to be secret. Thankfully, AAL, a Merlin-like figure overseeing Richard’s escapades, is around to help. Hickman delivers another oddly way-out adventure in his ongoing series. In addition to the aforementioned severed heads, the book also has a good dose of what, depending on the reader, may or may not be an excessive preoccupation with how the space foxes approach procreation. Still, all the sex and violence belies the true beating heart of Hickman’s latest series installment. In the end, it’s not the sweeping swordplay or blaster quick-draws that power the proceedings to this volume’s surprising conclusion, but rather the deep and potent love Richard and his interspecies family continue to have for one another, no matter what comes their way.
A wild galactic series entry that successfully remains grounded in heartfelt emotion.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 448
Publisher: RedFoxOnHigh
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2024
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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