A sleek, absorbing tale of motherhood, feminism, and the potential dangers of technology.
A woman in near-future America slowly realizes that her life may be under someone else’s control in this SF novel.
Vera Elpis lives what many would describe as a typical life. She has a steady job digitizing medical files at a document processing center and seems to prefer quiet solitude. Yet something is missing; she longs to be a mother, but regular fertility treatments have all failed. In the meantime, she revels in being an “Auntie” to her cousin Jennifer’s son and her friend Sarah Bennington’s three kids. Jennifer is the only family Vera knows; in fact, she can’t recall much before a car accident that resulted in an apparent brain injury. She’d certainly like to know more about who she had been. How, for instance, does she know the name of every plant in a garden? She’s a highly intelligent woman, so why does she have an “impulse to hide” among others who barely acknowledge her existence? One day, Vera’s hunt for answers as to why she’s unable to get pregnant finally turns up something—and it’s a shocker. Vera’s life may not truly be hers, as people have intentionally kept her in the dark concerning her foggy past. This big reveal has a tie to the tech company Perilaus Bionics, where Jennifer works and Sarah did, too, before she became a stay-at-home mom. As Vera continues to dig, she unearths ugly truths but also finds a way, however grim it may be, to regain the personal control that some have stripped away.
Woodsey delivers a hard–SF tale heavily steeped in metaphor. For starters, there are copious signs of realistic tech. Bots pop up almost everywhere, delivering food or cleaning windows, and Perilaus pioneered the use of microfilaments in prosthetics. As the title suggests, who or what has control is constantly in question, whether it’s advanced technology or simply a person. Vera has a manageable life; she excels at work and has no financial woes thanks to an inheritance. But she faces countless daily hurdles, especially as a woman. A male co-worker mocks her for being an exceptional employee, and she gets so much unwanted attention from male colleagues that she tries drowning it out with music in her headphones. Woodsey stylizes this narrative as Vera’s journal, which she begins at a doctor’s behest and maintains for personal reflections. As such, readers will sympathize with her, a woman who craves love while struggling to comprehend the affection Sarah has for her insolent husband. Vera’s intimate perspective likewise makes her perpetually simmering anger understandable as she fights to control it. Her fury stems from both global troubles (for example, massive cyberattacks) as well as things that are seemingly innocuous. As the story progresses, intrigue and a discernible SF element amp up. A highlight is Vera and Sarah’s conversations inside the latter’s makeshift Faraday cage—a basement tent of “metal mesh” and plenty of tinfoil blocking nosy transmissions. It perfectly suits the novel’s growing conspiracy, which leads to a gleefully dizzying final act that, while providing closure, is open to interpretation.
A sleek, absorbing tale of motherhood, feminism, and the potential dangers of technology.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0997333978
Page Count: 414
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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