Blake is gifted at attaining bestseller status; ascertaining her talent for authentic drama is more difficult.
Magic can’t solve the problems of this incredibly dysfunctional family.
As teenagers, Meredith, Arthur, and Eilidh Wren seemed poised for glorious futures. Now as the three approach 30, that promise seems to have gone a bit sour. A former lover is about to publish an article exposing prickly tech mogul Meredith as a fraud: She used magic to fake positive test results for a splashy new device which purportedly adjusts your brain chemistry to make you happy. Arthur, the country’s youngest congressman, watches his political fortunes tank while he juggles a complex love life that includes a devoted but apparently asexual wife as well as active participation in a pleasure-seeking throuple with a British aristocrat and a French race car driver. And lonely Eilidh mourns the glittering ballet career she lost five years ago to a car accident that injured her back, secretly pines for her father’s executive assistant, Dzhuliya, and worries about a secret ability that mimics the ten plagues. The three estranged siblings are forced to reckon with their past—and their future—when their domineering father, founder of the powerful corporation Wrenfare Magitech, suddenly dies. Blake has previously specialized in writing about brilliant, unpleasantly self-involved people; in this book, her apparently semiomniscient narrator actually comes straight out and tells you that all the Wrens are assholes. When the narrator’s identity is revealed (not that it was hard to figure out), it becomes clear that their opinions on the siblings are murkier than they previously admitted; but that might not do much to change the reader’s opinion as to whether there’s anything likable or indeed, relatable, about the Wrens. The author claims inspiration from Wes Anderson’s film The Royal Tenenbaums. She is clearly trying to establish the Wrens as Anderson types, charmingly quirky failures who have difficulty saying what they feel, struggling under the weight of expectations not fulfilled. Anderson’s cinematic world is contrived and artificial, existing in a sidestep from our reality; however, he can generally make his odd characters seem genuine. But Blake’s strange bundles of traits never quite coalesce as believable people.
Blake is gifted at attaining bestseller status; ascertaining her talent for authentic drama is more difficult.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781250883407
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
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
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.
A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.
Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374172
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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