A lighthearted, if sometimes confusing, time-travel tale that offers an homage to the ’90s music scene and the city of...
A troubled record shop owner goes back in time to relive her past, see a historic concert or two, and strive for redemption in Frye’s debut novel.
In her 40s, New Yorker Darby Derrex leaves behind a string of failed relationships and a momentous fall from grace on Wall Street to return to Chicago to take over her uncle’s record store. She’s glad to be back in the industry she loves but still dissatisfied with the humdrum aspects of retail. She hears an urban legend about the Chicago Grey Line subway, which is said to transport its passengers across temporal rather than physical distance, then happens upon a ticket to ride in the form of a “time pass watch,” which she finds in the Revolver Records’ back office. Darby catches a ride to 1996, where she finds she can relive her life as her younger self. She decides not to leave for New York this time and easily slides back into her role as a music journalist; she even snags a promotion. She also moves back in with her energetic, zany group of friends. This fantastical subway line doesn’t come without rules; most importantly, Darby only has 90 days to live in the past before being stuck there forever. But as she rekindles old relationships, strikes up new ones, and finds success in her career, the option of staying grows more appealing. Frye delivers a novel that’s veritably dripping with nostalgia. However, it’s more focused on reconstructing an impressively thorough ’90s pop-culture compendium than it is on developing a meaningful narrative arc. As it bounces between the past and present, some readers may find the timeline difficult to follow. Still, the author maintains a light, jocund touch in a tale that seems averse to anything with too much sincerity. Music aficionados will appreciate Darby’s music reviews, as published in her bimonthly column, as well as the extensive musical commentary throughout the narrative.
A lighthearted, if sometimes confusing, time-travel tale that offers an homage to the ’90s music scene and the city of Chicago.Pub Date: June 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63988-387-5
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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