A lovely, tear-jerking tale of time travel, familial love, and sacrifice.
In this first book in a YA sci-fi series, a grieving teenager goes back in time in a desperate attempt to save her younger brother.
Brooke Wallace is a senior in high school when her brother, Branson, develops a cough that won’t go away. Her family is devastated when he’s diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and dies within four months. Spiraling into depression, Brooke becomes “obsessed with the idea that I wasn’t living the life set for my soul”; soon, she decides to set things right by taking her government-approved trip back into her own past. In this near-future setting, all citizens get one free chance to relive part of their lives—however, time travelers are under strict orders not to do things differently and risk changing not only their timelines, but those of others. Yet Brooke feels sure that she can keep Branson alive without altering much else. With her parents’ blessing and secret research help from her brother’s doctor, she’s transported to a point months before Branson’s death. She’ll make a total of three trips as she struggles to figure out why Branson got sick—was it the cream for a skin rash or asbestos in an attic?—and keep him away from the cause. When her first attempt fails, she uses her mother’s trip. This go-round, she’s sure Branson’s escaped and strikes up a relationship with a boy named Charlie Johnson; then her brother starts coughing again, and when Brooke returns to her present, he’s still dead, her parents have separated, and she’s broken Charlie’s heart. Will Brooke ever be able to move on from Branson’s death? Or will she lose her life trying to save his? This poignant, well-written story puts mortality—and readers’ reactions to it—front and center. Brooke muses at the beginning of the tale: “The first time Branson died, the ‘original’ time, as I would come to refer to it, I almost died with him. Not literally, but figuratively. My soul broke into a thousand tiny pieces I didn’t think I would ever be able to put back together well enough to sustain a normal existence.” As Jahn (Let Them Burn Cake!, 2015, etc.) takes Brooke through the same events multiple times, the author explores how small changes can snowball into huge ones and how attitudes can influence, if not overcome, tragedy.
A lovely, tear-jerking tale of time travel, familial love, and sacrifice.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-76496-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: BermLord
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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