An enthralling continuation of a nimble, ultra-chic SF series.
Aibo’s SF sequel focuses on a high-school student who may be the key to ending a war in a mysterious realm.
Most of Cythiria Crenshaw’s memories are absent. She has no idea where she got the two scars on her forehead, but she does know that intermittent blinding headaches accompany them. As such, she’s a loner who, on her first day of high school, would rather be anywhere else. She makes a friend and finds herself persuaded to join a gym outside of school. Gym owner Rive Amber has an ulterior agenda: She believes the girl is crucial to stopping the war in Griddish, a domed realm that’s essentially a hub used for monitoring variations of worlds, such as Cythiria’s planet, Farth (or, as it’s called in Griddish, Var 7). Meanwhile, over on Earth (aka Var 8), Matere Songgaard, formerly a scientist in Griddish, gets word of the conflict in his erstwhile realm. He opts to head that way to gather intelligence, using a “Slipshot” portal that he discovers is, rather unusually and unexpectedly, open. It’s not easy for others to get access to a Slipshot, but that’s just what Cythiria’s father Fredrick Munchen and her new friend Chelss Brimwater will need if they want to pull her away from Rive’s influence. In the midst of all this are the Griddish “Vérkatrae,” emotionless machines that serve a variety of functions. But if they’re so coldly mechanical, what explains the animal-like Vérkatros that Cythiria befriends (and names), or the one that morphs into a “human shape?”
Aibo’s series’ sophomore installment brings back a plethora of characters, including Fredrick and Cythiria’s mother, Jillian. Readers returning to the series will settle right back in, but those just joining will have no problem following the crisp narration. There’s mystery for series newbies and veterans alike—it’s not immediately apparent what the war entails, or what Cythiria can do to thwart it. The story smoothly transitions between worlds that share some similarities; Farth, for example, has a planetary ring but is otherwise akin to Earth. While the futuristic tech (such as the close-combat weapon called the Plaxis Strand) is compelling, this narrative’s human element stands out the most. (Cythiria is an angsty teen who warily opens up to Chelss (with the possibility of romance) and has a strained relationship with her mother Jillian, whom Cythiria noticeably does not call “Mom.”) Vibrant descriptions throughout bring even inanimate objects to life: “In the distance, a cluster of tall spike-shaped buildings reached towards the white sky. They looked broken, abandoned, eerie, a desolate cityscape that had been burnt and crushed by some unseen monster.” In the same vein, recurrent uses of onomatopoeia truly resonate, as in the “thump” of a heart, the “clang” of metals, and the “whoosh” of vehicles speeding past. As in the preceding installment, Sunada-Wong and Juarez’s colorful artwork includes individual character profiles and ravishing two-page spectacles, the highlight being a flat-bodied, spidery-legged Vérkatros whose multihued surface illuminates an awestruck Cythiria.
An enthralling continuation of a nimble, ultra-chic SF series.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9798987084540
Page Count: 351
Publisher: Mint Cookie Industries
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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