A complex tale of the end times with skillful worldbuilding.
This dramatic Christian fantasy novel, set after the rapture, alternates between heaven and Earth to tell a story of the battle for the souls of humanity.
The well-known prophecy of the second coming of Jesus Christ gets a completely new twist in this text, which follows multiple groups of characters. First, the author pulls back the curtain on Harem, the realm of angels who plan to rescue “the righteous” in an invasion of Earth that humans will perceive as a mass alien abduction. Later, brilliant but nonbelieving medical researchers Yvette Milagro and Wen “Winnie” Chow Lee, along with Yvette’s 10-year-old daughter, Mia, wake up and find the injured Hoshea (aka Jesus) when the rapture occurs. The story bounces between Harem and Earth with additional subplots that follow 13-year-old Artemis and her family, who are raptured in North Carolina and begin the process of becoming full-fledged angels, as well as the first rumbles of the Antichrist coming to power. Meanwhile, a New York City police detective named Reynolds and National Security Agency operative Akachi Ihejika pursue the researchers and Hoshea in the post-rapture world. Readers of high fantasy will recognize the in-depth worldbuilding in debut author Perez’s descriptions of the technology and mystical powers of Harem, which include time- and space-traveling devices and celestial weaponry for fighting the Helem, or demons. The journey of the humans in Harem is particularly compelling, drawing out deep philosophical insights. The dialogue-driven story focuses on how demonstrations of love are capable of changing hearts, but at its core, it aims to offer nothing less than a tale of an epic struggle between good and evil. This Christian novel showcases human emotions and sacrifice without preaching or out-of-place spirituality; even divine beings are portrayed as experiencing something new during this era of history. The novel is also action-packed, offering harrowing helicopter travel, devilish enemies, and gut-wrenching losses of innocence. The author helpfully outlines the dizzying array of characters in a “Character Key” at the end, and the story clearly hints at a sequel.
A complex tale of the end times with skillful worldbuilding.Pub Date: March 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73217-180-0
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Aristo's Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.
Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.
Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0141180633
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
PERSPECTIVES
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
© 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.
