A smart, far-future space saga with a sympathetic protagonist facing stranglehold parental control.
A teenager aboard the Hope, a giant spaceship on a long voyage to colonize another world, seeks freedom from her rich, tyrannical father with a long-shot bid to join the first team of planetary settlers.
In this SF series opener, Hoff assumes readers are savvy enough to need no introductions to genre concepts like a “generation ship,” a deep-space ark taking breeding earthlings on a millennialong trek to a new life on another planet. The Hope is one such vessel, now 30 years away from the destination planet, Shindashir. But ship life is stifling for Anastasia Cartier—aka Anya—the 15-year-old daughter of the venal Thomas Cartier, the wealthiest man aboard and, hence, the population’s major behind-the-scenes influence (including on criminal activities). Controlling his family with a nightmarish web of surveillance, Thomas wants Anya to remain on the ship to marry 25-year-old rising officer Ryan Lancet—which will not only affirm the Cartier power base, but also continue the family’s rare, White Anglo bloodline. Anya wants to break from her dysfunctional dynasty by joining the first vanguard of departing colonists, but she faces multiple obstacles, including being unfairly regarded as a privileged, spoiled rich kid. Worse, her ruthless father becomes violent when he does not get his way. A surprise ally for Anya is her new workmate in the ship’s greenhouses, dreadlocked teen Borsk King, declared doomed and nonreproducing material because of a rare genetic condition but secretly the best hacker on the Hope. Yet is he good enough to thwart Thomas’ machinations? Whereas other authors might indulge in breathless, Arthur C. Clarke–style descriptions of starship engineering and vast cosmic vistas, Hoff focuses instead on the psychological claustrophobia suffered by a hero in a cramped minitechnocracy where arranged mating via DNA optimization is the norm. On the Hope, rampant spying, loss of privacy, and betrayal go hand in hand with numerous regulations designed to protect the innocent (but which somehow fail). In a standard, time-proven, future-dystopia trope, Anya is caught between potential love interests who are both captivating and utterly impossible. Thomas makes one of the more compelling bad-dad villains this side of Darth Vader in this engaging, if sometimes talky, tale.
A smart, far-future space saga with a sympathetic protagonist facing stranglehold parental control.Pub Date: July 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73507-421-4
Page Count: 254
Publisher: The Pencil Princess Workshop
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2021
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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