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
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.
Some people are born supervillains, and others have supervillainy thrust upon them.
Charlie Fitzer, a former business journalist–turned–substitute teacher, is broke and somewhat desperate. His circumstances take an unexpected and dangerous turn when his estranged uncle Jake dies, leaving his business—i.e., his trillion-dollar supervillain empire—to Charlie. Charlie doesn’t really have the skills or experience to manage the staff of the volcano lair, and matters don’t improve when he’s pressured to attend a high-level meeting with other supervillains, none of whom got along with his uncle. With the aid of his uncle’s No. 1, Mathilda Morrison, and his cat, Hera (who turns out to be an intelligent and typing-capable spy for his uncle’s organization), Charlie must sort out whom he can trust before he gets blackmailed, blown up, or both. This book serves as a follow-up of sorts to Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022) in that both are riffs on genre film tropes. The current work is fluffier and sillier than the previous novel and, indeed, many of Scalzi’s other books, although there is the occasional jab about governments being in bed with unscrupulous corporate enterprises or the ways in which people can profit from human suffering. This is one of many available stories about a good-hearted Everyman thrust into fantastical circumstances, struggling to survive as a fish out of water, and, while well executed for its type, the plot doesn’t go anywhere that will surprise you.
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780765389220
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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