A skillful and enjoyable blend of post-apocalyptic drama and soap opera.
A young detective seeks to find his place in a futuristic underground colony in Feltman’s SF novel, the second in a series.
Manny Stewart is a young NYPD detective living in the underground Colony of New York in 2364; a powerful hurricane, the product of climate change, destroyed New York City and forced 7,000 survivors to resettle in its subway system. Manny married Naztazya, his high-school sweetheart, and they have a young son, Zack. Manny’s relationship with his late father, Patrick, the former police chief, was complicated: Patrick had been an abusive, hardcore alcoholic. He also ran black-market trade with Philadelphia, making the Stewart family rich. Tragedy strikes Manny when Naztazya and their unborn second child are killed in a fire. His heroic actions taken during the blaze cause his professional career to flourish, both at the New York Police Department and in the political sphere. He starts drinking brandy to dull his pain, both emotional and physical, following a back injury (“He took another generous pull and then placed the flask back in his uniform pocket, so he didn’t forget to take it with him when he left for work”). Manny also makes a potentially catastrophic discovery with profound implications for the Colony. The author deserves kudos for her vivid conception of what a climate change–ravaged world might look like. In her Colony, humanity not only survives but thrives in a situation that feels both familiar and yet very different—life goes on as the populace clings to a willful ignorance concerning ecological devastation (Feltman is subtly preachy on this topic). Manny is an easy character to root for—he received a leg up thanks to his inherited wealth, but he doesn’t lord it over people. His character is also engagingly complex; he should have learned from the bad example of his father, but he still turns to liquor during difficult times. This is an engaging tale that is optimistic about the future despite a past full of avoidable suffering.
A skillful and enjoyable blend of post-apocalyptic drama and soap opera.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2024
ISBN: 9781737164227
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2023
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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