A slow-burning, palpably grim dystopian tale.
This post-apocalyptic debut sees a young woman with a past on the trail of a missing person.
The Decline has crippled the world. Rooted in global warming, the phenomenon encompasses humanity’s failure to cope with savage weather, food and water shortages, mosquito plagues, and diseases like the West Nile virus running amok. Samarra is from the barren South—a place requiring mental and physical discipline called Seira—but her new friends in the chaotic North think she’s from nearby Kanlan. Among the Vauns, who protect their own, she’s a drudge who travels around the Barrow, a half-flooded and trash-strewn city, to collect items from her group’s network of contacts. Sam is also friends with Ava, a woman whose daughter, Raina, could be missing or dead. Ava allows the Southerner to stay with her at an abandoned factory and use Raina’s boots and bed. One day, Sam discusses with Jackal, a fellow Vaun, how people often leave their lives behind on the solstice, hoping to start fresh elsewhere. Jackal suggests that Raina bolted with Finlay, her boyfriend. Later, members of the compound—Sam, Jackal, Hakuund, and twins Cassio and Xenia—visit a “party spot” called the Hive, where people enjoy music, gambling, and drinks. After a fire breaks out at the club and they barely escape, Sam’s dreams about her life in the South grow more intense. A sense of loss and failure surrounds a man named Corvus, and Sam begins to realize that finding Raina may mitigate the tragedy that her life has become. In this dour, atmospheric series opener, Lee explores how both the North and South cope with a ruined planet. In the North, stark environmental devastation haunts lines like “There was a mutation and the beetle’s appetite expanded to include other types of softwoods. Then came a second mutation and the hardwoods began to die.” Yet humanity perseveres, finding solace at card tables and drum circles, where “it was loud and damp and bordering on painful, but it was beautiful, and beauty was rare.” The author alternates chapters of Sam’s search for Raina with the protagonist’s Southern past as a child of the Administration. Militarized training centers keep reading, writing, and arithmetic alive while instilling a harsh code of conduct. Protector Gin, for example, tells cadets excited by guns to “prove that you can be trusted with a blade, and maybe you’ll get a projectile.” While these moments further darken the tale, reminding readers of a United States obsessed with the Second Amendment, the South’s “annual contests” are colorful shoutouts to genre favorites like The Hunger Games. Sam’s mission to locate Raina is slow to develop, though realistic in the way that she wakes to an inner conflict, summarized by the line “You think you can do one good thing one time for somebody else and it’ll erase what you did?” The truth behind Raina’s fate touches on another modern-day dilemma—one that hits women the hardest—and the sequel should anchor much of the worldbuilding done in the South.
A slow-burning, palpably grim dystopian tale.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77359-291-0
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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