A bracing narrative that confronts hard truths and raises fascinating possibilities.
Feltman’s thought-provoking speculative novel follows humanity underground in the wake of climate change catastrophes.
Manny is the son of Patrick Stewart, the police chief for the colony of New York in the year 2350. Three hundred years earlier, Hurricane Yolanda drove New York City residents into the subway system, where 7,000 brave souls set up a new underground community. When the book opens, Manny is lonely; ever since Manny’s beloved mother died three years earlier, Patrick has thrown himself into his work and ignored his son. Manny’s life changes when he makes a new, older friend, Julio Suarez. He spends more and more time at the Suarez home until they officially become his foster family following a particularly abusive episode with the alcoholic Patrick. The rest of the story focuses on how Manny grows and matures in a loving environment, though the shadow of Patrick continues to loom large throughout the story. As he nears graduation, Manny begins to wonder if the outside world might once again be hospitable for humans; the epilogue neatly sets up the next volume in Feltman’s Starlight and Ashes trilogy (“Maybe the environment is no longer as hostile to human beings as it was in the early days of gasoline engines and deforestation, earthquakes and wild fires”). In her debut work, the author succeeds in creating a believable civilization established by survivors of extreme weather. The colony’s residents have to walk and are restricted to vegetarian diets, yet they still have electronic devices—the clever survivors haven’t been forced back to the Stone Age. But cultural inertia has set in over the centuries, and nobody gives any thought to the outside world that their ancestors left behind, despite its potential. In addition to serving as a cautionary tale, the book describes a boy’s journey to find a family to call his own after being rejected by his father. Manny is a fascinating case study of nature versus nurture—watching him evolve is even more entrancing than exploring the contradictory place in which he lives.
A bracing narrative that confronts hard truths and raises fascinating possibilities.Pub Date: July 31, 2021
ISBN: 9781737164210
Page Count: 333
Publisher: ANJ Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2024
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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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