An expert blend of SF yarn, thriller, and romance that results in a compulsively readable and imaginative novel.
In Resau’s SF novel, a teenage girl travels to a tropical island to learn the secrets behind a tech empire and save her dying sister in the process.
The year is 2154 and 16-year-old Liv is on a mission to save her younger sister, Shell. Sickened by living in a “contaminated, off-limits zone by the Chesapeake Bay,” Shell is preserved in a state of suspended animation in which she’s “technically dead with the potential for revival.” But in only two months, her “hibernation” will max out and Shell will die forever. This situation compels Liv to join an internship program on a remote island, ostensibly to learn about the dazzling technological advances of the Virch Empire, the tech company responsible for making the virtual-reality lenses almost everyone wears. In reality, however, Liv intends to find a cure for her sister. She finds unexpected help when she meets Wolf, the rogue son of the Virch Empire’s founder. Disillusioned with his father’s work and at odds with his corrupted brother, Spiro, Wolf teams up with Liv as they stumble upon plans for Project Dragon—a horrific bioweapon that could help Wolf’s father gain the immortality he so desperately seeks. With Liv’s visionary lucid dreams guiding the way, she and Wolf struggle to find answers as they become increasingly unsure of what is reality and what is illusion. Resau has created a hero who is smart, determined, and vulnerable—a dynamic combination that is sure to keep readers hooked. While there are some lighthearted moments (high-tech gadgets like the virtual-reality “virchlenses” exist alongside old-fashioned hand sanitizers), the majority of the novel is a tense save-the-world journey leavened by a budding romance. Quick pacing and naturalistic dialogue, along with a series of authentic twists and turns, make for an action-packed yet frequently philosophical look at what makes us human.
An expert blend of SF yarn, thriller, and romance that results in a compulsively readable and imaginative novel.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781958109502
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Owl Hollow Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
