An appealingly soul-searching dystopian novel that emphasizes its characters’ inherent humanity.
Two heroes must navigate a society divided between natural-born humans and lab-created beings in Sweet’s dystopian SF thriller.
In 2185, Harper Rawls lives in League City, Texas. Her father, Matthew, owns the Jarro bar, frequented by members of the Human Pride Movement, who act violently toward beings born in labs, known officially as “models.” When Matthew learns that his wife, Aayushi, has cheated on him with a model, he kills her and himself with a proton rifle. After Harper recovers from this psychological trauma in a hospital, she meets Ordell Bentley, Aayushi’s lover, who’s on the run from both the Human Pride Movement and Emergent Biotechnology, the company that created and owns him. He’s considering escaping to Canada with the assistance of the Freedom Underground movement. Harper and Ordell bond, due to their shared feelings of displacement, and decide to make an escape together. She gets a job as a biology lab administrator under Dr. Torrent Toussaint as part of this plan, but things get complicated when she and the doctor fall for each other. She becomes a Model Advocate for the lab as its research investigates consciousness using a series of models. Then bounty hunters find Ordell, and Harper must figure out how to save him. Sweet opens his dystopian series in a world that feels upsettingly plausible, due to a series of climate disasters called “Equilibrium,” which raised oceans and killed grasslands; reproductive rates crashed, making models a solution to labor shortages. Biological implants also convincingly change humans’ lives; Harper, for instance, has a “micro-mood stabilizer” to regulate her brain’s chemicals. But although future science drives his plot, Sweet’s central themes deal with relatable sociological and political themes; at one point, for instance, Toussaint’s lab partner Railynn Marche tells Harper of her own advocacy for models, and how their society has a long way to go when it comes to accepting them: “People may listen and nod along, but whether you change what's in their hearts is different.” In the end, the cast strives on through a convincingly imperfect world.
An appealingly soul-searching dystopian novel that emphasizes its characters’ inherent humanity.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2020
ISBN: 979-8561440618
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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