Original touches and a misanthropic protagonist keep this clever time-travel tale ticking along nicely.
In Unwin’s SF debut, a troubleshooter for a secret, time-traveling agency visits three different eras in pursuit of someone meddling with the American Revolution.
Joad Bevan is a jaded member of the Time Management Agency, a top-secret government group in Washington state whose operatives work to detect and counteract rogue time travelers. Journeying through time and space can be achieved with modest-scale, exotic chemical reactions, discovered in the 1980s, that generate tachyons (faster-than-light particles). The TMA, fortunately, has the resources to prevent any upstart “time vandal” from disrupting the natural, chronological order of things. Joad must pretend that he’s merely doing arcane, cutting-edge scientific research to keep his winemaker wife, Bess, in the dark. Despite the secrecy, the protagonist finds his workplace dreary and rather absurd—existentially, psychologically, and logically. Then a massive tachyon strike on the TMA complex leaves the base shattered, with the rest of the staff cast back centuries to Colonial North America, and Joad finds himself in an altered landscape. He takes an emergency jump back to the early TMA of 1996 and discovers—in addition to a more positive office environment and a potential new love interest—that one of the agency’s own employees has turned against TMA and is meddling with historical events in 1777 Pennsylvania. Joad’s attempted rescue mission, however, opens up a maze of time paradoxes. Over the course of the novel, Unwin seems to have had quite a lot of fun engineering the plot’s Mobius strip twists and turns and philosophizing a bit about the elasticity of time and the universe (and yes, Doctor Who fans, there is a TARDIS joke). The grumbling hero would be the first to admit that a great deal of his story makes little sense in a straightforward way, and his refreshing attitude helps wind the mainspring of an SF subgenre that’s grown a bit lax from overuse. If Michael Crichton’s 1999 novel Timeline had starred as astringent a lead character as Joad, maybe its 2003 movie adaptation would have been better.
Original touches and a misanthropic protagonist keep this clever time-travel tale ticking along nicely.Pub Date: April 24, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-71-537894-1
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2021
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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