Imagine "The Hunger Games" refashioned into a rowdy, profane, and indignant blues shout at full blast.
An acerbic, poignant, and, at times, alarmingly pertinent dystopian novel ravages two malign institutions: one involving privately owned prisons, the other feeding America’s addiction to violent sports.
In his debut short story collection, Friday Black (2018), Adjei-Brenyah displayed a prodigious flair for deadpan satiric narratives set in alternate realities that often seem uncomfortably close to our own, especially regarding race and class divisions. With his first novel, he proves he can sustain his outrage, imagination, wit, and compassion for a deeper dive into the darker reaches of the American soul. As with the earlier stories, the novel is set not in the future but in a warped vision of the present in which a private consortium called Criminal Action Penal Entertainment produces duels to the death between convicted murderers before packed arenas and TV cameras. CAPE’s two most charismatic and successful gladiators are women: Loretta Thurwar and Hamara Stacker, aka Hurricane Staxxx, who are also lovers. Staxxx, who tends to weep copiously after each bloody victory, is dreading the ever nearer day when Loretta will earn her freedom, having survived and triumphed with CAPE for three years under the terms established for “clemency, commutation of sentence, or a full pardon" under the Rightful Choice Act. Protestors show up outside every CAPE death match to protest that law and the whole penal system in an all-out movement to repeal it. Meanwhile, CAPE’s corporate masters tighten their hold on the status quo (and keep their TV ratings up) as Loretta struggles against mounting odds to help Staxxx and other gladiators of varied races and genders achieve relative dignity within their imprisonment. Adjei-Brenyah displays his impressive range of tone and voice as he deftly manipulates several points of view through shifting time periods; all the while, he maintains control over the elements of his dreaded alternate America, using footnotes and asides to elaborate on the laws and customs of this world but also making direct and similarly detailed connections to the real-life, present-day state of the nation’s mass incarceration system with its brutalities and injustices. It is an up-to-the-minute j’accuse that speaks to the eternal question of what it truly means to be free. And human.
Imagine "The Hunger Games" refashioned into a rowdy, profane, and indignant blues shout at full blast.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-31733-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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
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