An angry, harrowing, and topical, if occasionally flawed, what-if actioner.
After a plague destroys civilization, a young, white Virginian finds himself in the midst of a race war between barbaric neo-Nazi warriors and people of color and their allies throughout Appalachia in Neill’s (Finding St. Lo, 2019, etc.) novel.
In the 2020s, a deadly disease that eats away at the skin kills billions, resulting in an anarchic society. Most survivors are people of color, particularly those of African descent, who have natural immunity. Others that remain include white supremacists, born-again Confederates, neo-Nazis, doomsday Christians, and resurgent Viking-raider types, who are gearing up for a race war—and all are heavily armed. Scot Jamieson is the lone survivor of his prominent Virginia family, who wrote him off as an underachiever. Now he’s alone again after his post-catastrophe settlement—the remnants of his family’s affluent housing development—is devastated by a wave of white brutes sweeping through the territories. Members of a largely black settlement of generous, savvy survivors rescue him using impressive fighting skills. He finds a mentor and verbal sparring partner in Kimberly Bethune Tomlinson, a home-schooled black girl with an illuminating Afrocentric worldview. However, many of the strong emotional bonds that Scot makes are shattered when barbaric racists kidnap or murder his friends. Scot tries to find and protect those who still remain despite ongoing conflicts with a marauding Nazi horde called Right Nation, who draw their fascist philosophy from such sources as the Bible and racist writings of Abraham Lincoln. Its leadership only tolerates nonwhite people in their midst as underlings or sex slaves—as Kim soon finds out. Imagine a vivid, nail-biting apocalyptic horror novel on the scale of Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) or Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954) that replaces mutated vampire-zombie-cannibals with scruffy Ku Klux Klan recruits (who are also cannibals). Certainly, the action is satisfying—Neill can describe ghastly, unsparingly bloody combat and atrocities with the best of them—but there’s also no shortage of thoughtfulness. By getting inside the heads of the enemy, the author clearly lays out the sinister cosmology of organized racism and entitlement, as when Right Nation leaders orate at length and debate the formidable Kim to justify their hateful crusade. President Donald Trump and his followers are specifically called out, as are Fox News, Ted Nugent, and Kid Rock, and shoutouts and praise go to former Black Panther Bobby Seale and African American authors Octavia Butler, Audre Lord, and James Baldwin, among others. Although Scot’s eyes are roughly opened to his society’s race-related shortcomings, the much-abused hero still manages to come up with a potentially nonviolent strategy to undermine the white-supremacist onslaught. Even so, the lengthy narrative ultimately winds down to a grisly grudge-match showdown between the principal characters, painting the pages red—and leaving far too much hanging. Another grating detail is the inclusion of an angelic orphaned girl, who apparently exists only to be put in deadly danger—a narrative device that calls to mind the adorable tykes that Michael Crichton insisted on menacing with velociraptors.
An angry, harrowing, and topical, if occasionally flawed, what-if actioner.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 858
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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