by Allen Steele ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 6, 2012
Awkward prose notwithstanding, this is for anyone who’s gazed longingly upward.
Despite prose weaknesses, this space adventure with spectacular settings demonstrates that sometimes you can’t keep a good plot down.
One August night in 2097, in suburban Maryland, Jamey’s father wakes him at midnight and tells him to pack a bag and hurry. The family piles into their van, and Dad inches it down the street with headlights off. The president’s dead and the dangerous vice president’s detaining activist scientists like Dad, who intends to hide his kids “[t]he last place [the government would] ever think of looking”: Apollo colony, on the moon. But shuttle launches are no secret. Soon after the rushed launch, Navy jets and a missile barely miss taking them down. Jamey finds himself fighting propaganda campaigns and a lunar ground battle against the corrupt U.S. regime—all while getting accustomed to living on the moon, where, due to lower gravity, he can walk without his wheelchair for the first time. Nitty-gritty details about space travel, astronomy and lunar geography and geology (Apollo's mines provide “the principal source of Earth’s energy reserves”) are fascinating yet tightly crammed and hard to decipher. Steele’s text is ever-factual, which is alienating during emotional dialogue. But nothing beats learning what it’s like to walk around the moon and how the Earth appears from there.
Awkward prose notwithstanding, this is for anyone who’s gazed longingly upward. (Science fiction. 11-16)Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61614-686-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Pyr/Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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by Scott Reintgen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2017
Fast-moving and intriguing though inconsistent on multiple fronts.
Kids endure rigorous competition aboard a spaceship.
When Babel Communications invites 10 teens to participate in “the most serious space exploration known to mankind,” Emmett signs on. Surely it’s the jackpot: they’ll each receive $50,000 every month for life, and Emmett’s mother will get a kidney transplant, otherwise impossible for poor people. They head through space toward the planet Eden, where they’ll mine a substance called nyxia, “the new black gold.” En route, the corporation forces them into brutal competition with one another—fighting, running through violent virtual reality racecourses, and manipulating nyxia, which can become almost anything. It even forms language-translating facemasks, allowing Emmett, a black boy from Detroit, to communicate with competitors from other countries. Emmett's initial understanding of his own blackness may throw readers off, but a black protagonist in outer space is welcome. Awkward moments in the smattering of black vernacular are rare. Textual descriptions can be scanty; however, copious action and a reality TV atmosphere (the scoreboard shows regularly) make the pace flow. Emmett’s first-person voice is immediate and innocent: he realizes that Babel’s ruthless and coldblooded but doesn’t apply that to his understanding of what’s really going on. Readers will guess more than he does, though most confirmation waits for the next installment—this ends on a cliffhanger.
Fast-moving and intriguing though inconsistent on multiple fronts. (Science fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-55679-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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by Sarah Arthur ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 30, 2024
Evocations of Narnia are not enough to salvage this fantasy, which struggles with thin character development.
A portal fantasy survivor story from an established devotional writer.
Fourteen-year-old Eva’s maternal grandmother lives on a grand estate in England; Eva and her academic parents live in New Haven, Connecticut. When she and Mum finally visit Carrick Hall, Eva is alternately resentful at what she’s missed and overjoyed to connect with sometimes aloof Grandmother. Alongside questions of Eva’s family history, the summer is permeated by a greater mystery surrounding the work of fictional children’s fantasy writer A.H.W. Clifton, who wrote a Narnialike series that Eva adores. As it happens, Grandmother was one of several children who entered and ruled Ternival, the world of Clifton’s books; the others perished in 1952, and Grandmother hasn’t recovered. The Narnia influences are strong—Eva’s grandmother is the Susan figure who’s repudiated both magic and God—and the ensuing trauma has created rifts that echo through her relationships with her daughter and granddaughter. An early narrative implication that Eva will visit Ternival to set things right barely materializes in this series opener; meanwhile, the religious parable overwhelms the magic elements as the story winds on. The serviceable plot is weakened by shallow characterization. Little backstory appears other than that which immediately concerns the plot, and Eva tends to respond emotionally as the story requires—resentful when her seething silence is required, immediately trusting toward characters readers need to trust. Major characters are cued white.
Evocations of Narnia are not enough to salvage this fantasy, which struggles with thin character development. (author’s note, map, author Q&A) (Religious fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780593194454
Page Count: 384
Publisher: WaterBrook
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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