A fast-paced, suspenseful dystopian picaresque, part Huck Finn and part bizarro-world Swiss Family Robinson, with the latter...
After Minnesota is overrun by ancient Scythians and a wasp-borne plague, 16-year-old Macy and her family embark on adventures of ever-escalating weirdness as they make their way down the Mississippi toward safety that no longer exists.
DeNiro (stories: Skinny-Dipping in the Lake of the Dead, 2006) opens his debut novel in semi-comic register, as the family struggles to adjust to a weird new order involving soldier-looters in Lakers jerseys, the shuttering of all non–fast-food businesses, SUV chassis towed by mules and a scar-faced guard at the family’s riverside internment camp who sends Macy a looted necklace via her younger brother Ciaran. “I had a disfigured stalker with a sword,” she wisecracks. “This made going stag to junior prom look like a joke.” The mood grows steadily darker and grimmer. First Ciaran gets involved in intrigues among factions of the anachronistic warriors who have overrun the entire country and are battling for turf from coast to coast. The family manages to escape on a boat that limps south toward St. Louis, where Macy’s father, an astronomer, keeps insisting that a university job awaits him. Along the way both Macy and her mother are stricken with the plague; Macy’s sister runs off and is sold into indenture; they encounter elephants and giraffes, a wooden submarine and a talking dog. Eventually Ciaran is captured and sent south to Nueva Roma for trial and execution. Their father, now thriving in the former St. Louis as an astrologer, dispatches the recovered Macy to the grand delta capital to see if anything can be done to help her brother.
A fast-paced, suspenseful dystopian picaresque, part Huck Finn and part bizarro-world Swiss Family Robinson, with the latter winning out—to the benefit of those reading for plot and perhaps the disappointment of those looking for literary ambition.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-553-59254-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Spectra/Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
If you accept the notion that the laws of gravity are just suggestions, this makes for a grand entertainment.
Bennett (City of Miracles, 2017, etc.) inaugurates another series of imaginative, thoroughly idiosyncratic fantasy novels.
Mona Lisa meets The Matrix in Bennett’s introduction to the carefully constructed world of Tevanne, a city-state dominated by four merchant houses—literally. The four big boys (think Amazon, Google, Facebook, and…well, Penguin Random House, maybe) occupy fortresses that, though stoutly built and heavily patrolled, are no match for Sancia Grado, a gamin version of the Tom Cruise of Mission Impossible, if not Spiderman. Sancia scales walls and penetrates castle keeps with ease, and she’s not above dispatching a guard or two in the pursuit of her work: “She did have her stiletto, and she was an able sneak, and though she was small, she was strong for her size.” Bless her heart, Sancia shows mercy, pulls off the heist she was hired for, then retreats into the teeming, seething world between the walls of those great houses, whose masters have made a killing with a thing called “scriving”—“instructions written upon mindless objects that convinced them to disobey reality in select ways.” Thus a carriage on a horizontal plane might be commanded to roll as if on a steep slope, removing the need for horses to pull it. But what if some corporate villain were to scrive a person in such a way that he or she might become a soldier impervious to pain or discomfort, an arrow that might travel with the wall-breaking force of a cannonball? That’s the scenario Sancia tumbles into when she discovers that she’s stolen—wait for it—a talking key named, naturally, Clef. The baddies want Clef to complete their job of world domination, Clef wants to find the lock of his dreams, and Sancia—well, Sancia has many a fish to fry, alternately helped along and hindered by fellow criminal masterminds, proletarians, a well-connected cop worthy of Umberto Eco, executives of ill intent, and a few other talking inanimate objects.
If you accept the notion that the laws of gravity are just suggestions, this makes for a grand entertainment.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6036-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Besher serves up cyberpunk with a ginseng twist and the scent of sandalwood incense. In the world of 2027, Japanese mega- conglomerates sumo wrestle for global supremacy while the rest of the world jacks into spiritual enlightenment (via software designed by monks) or breathless adventure in giant virtual reality realms. Frank Gobi, a ``consciousness detective,'' is called in by the Satori Corporation to investigate threats against Satori City, a metropolis that exists only in virtual reality. When the terrorists attack, and millions of VR users—including Gobi's son Trevor—are trapped in a kind of electronic limbo, the brave new gumshoe begins his quest as a virtual warrior. Gobi teams with a Tibetan lama in a futuristic odd couple, brushes against beautiful and insatiable women, and ultimately winds up in a cyberpunk showdown with the denizens of corporate neo-Nippon. A fresh, picaresque tour of cyberspace, packed with chop-socky punches, gushing spiritualism, and lots of campy laughs. While the ride gets bumpy, it marks the debut of a writer who isn't afraid to try a new road through familiar territory.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-258527-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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