A fervent look at a world that mirrors our own but fails to fully reflect it.
In an alternative present in which Al Gore won the 2000 election, Maddie Ryan comes to her own radical awakening on the Houston streets as an accidental member of a riotous people’s uprising.
The year is 2020. The war on terror has been replaced with the war on climate change, and most aspects of daily life must navigate the labyrinthine Bureau of Carbon Regulation. Maddie Ryan is a white woman in her mid-20s, newly divorced, and teaching at a predominantly Black school in Houston whose students seem to loathe her. When she meets Fish—“a soft, six-foot-two giant” with “a wild red beard, mad-scientist hair”—she is first attracted to him only because he is the polar opposite of her Bible-thumping, sexually conflicted ex. When Fish buys a derelict warehouse in Houston’s historically Black Eighth Ward with the aim of creating “an anarcho-communist creative space,” however, Maddie realizes a relationship with him comes with other benefits. In the Lab, Maddie meets Red (xe/xim) and Gestas (he/him), who together form the guitar-and-drum punk duo Bunny Bloodlust. Gestas, a home-incarcerated carbon felon whose gender presentation involves both a beard and “a baby-pink, pleated, A-line skirt,” fascinates Maddie, but Red, who is “tall and laconic,” with “sweat-slicked black hair falling across xir eyes,” makes her “heart fly off in wild, syncopated rhythms” from the first. In spite of her “queer-hating, strict Catholic” upbringing, Maddie embraces the world that opens to her at the Lab, wins over Red and Gestas with her church youth group–earned guitar chops, joins Bunny Bloodlust, and begins a political awakening guided by Gestas’ extensive library of leftist theory. Then she finds a third and final notice of eviction from the city in Fish’s mailbox. Faced with the dissolution of her new world, Maddie joins the ongoing effort to Save the Eighth and quickly becomes part of a movement with bigger dreams and far more drastic consequences than she could have imagined. This fierce, frenetic, and intensely impassioned novel takes a deep dive into the damage neoliberal thinking wreaks on marginalized communities; however, it also consistently prioritizes the identity politics of its multiply marginalized characters over the nuance of complex, unpredictable, fully human individuals capable of speaking to the reader’s heart rather than to the better angels of our ideologies.
A fervent look at a world that mirrors our own but fails to fully reflect it.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781646142668
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Levine Querido
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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