An ambitious, explosive yarn about overreaching technology that often lacks clarity.
In a futuristic world ruled by a brutal class of technocrats, a student named Ahra fights for survival.
In the second installment of Freeland’s fantasy series, the world of Mark Twelve, home to a weighty judicial field of barristers and scholars, is in a state of a chaos. Mark Twelve has upper and lower levels of residents, and Ahra is from the lower. She had a rare chance to receive an education at the best of schools and the opportunity to rise up in society; now, she’s disillusioned by this draconian world, where everything people do is logged on a device called the IPF. She feels used: “I’m just the experiment they all keep watching, waiting for me to prove them right—that I don’t belong.” The law lecturer Byblos believes in Ahra, though, and wants her to attend lectures as a full-time student. After being caught up in a scandal involving stolen materials from a science facility and a couple of murders on the docks, Ahra is found concussed in the ocean. Meanwhile, the energy grid in Mark Twelve is failing—a campaign led by Ansin Beomn to restore it led to unexpected conflict. Ahra comes to see that the order of the Mark is really just violence, now that the behind-the-scenes violence is raging in front of her. Freeland’s fantasy/SF thriller sounds a timely warning about a future world that’s technologically advanced but failing when it comes to freedom, energy, and long-term survival. Ahra is a relatable, honest character, and the story’s legal scenes provide grounding in the fast-paced, fantastical narrative. Not everything in the story is clearly defined, though, and the novel can be confusing and hard to follow. Conflict rages, but it’s often difficult to tell exactly why or between whom—the tale overflows with too many characters, gadgets, and entities whose roles and purposes remain obscure.
An ambitious, explosive yarn about overreaching technology that often lacks clarity.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2026
ISBN: 9798999977151
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2026
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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