by Anna North ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 18, 2011
An entertaining, stylishly written doomsday novel.
On an island nation created after North America is ravaged by a new Ice Age, 18-year-old Darcy uncovers dark secrets about her homeland and its past when her mother Sarah goes missing.
North's richly imagined first novel is set several decades from now on the island of America Pacifica, located somewhere west of Hawaii and under threat of invader ships from the former 50th state. One of the only inhabitable places left in the world, it features facsimile towns like Manhattanville, Little Los Angeles and Upper Chicagoland that mirror cities past. Darcy, a waitress, lives a hand-to-mouth existence with Sarah, a pearl diver by trade, in a leaky apartment. Her mother, who arrived on the first boat from the mainland as a child, pointedly refuses to talk about her previous life. As she investigates Sarah's disappearance, Darcy is slowly awakened to the island's despotic rule, under which most citizens eat imitation turkey (jellyfish), seaweed salad and egg "product" while a privileged few living in exclusive areas dine on real steak and potatoes. Darcy also learns about a mainland visionary whose ideas so threaten the ruling powers, they are determined to kill people like Sarah who knew or had any connections with him. After she befriends radicals with plans to overthrow the aging ruler and his fake board of governors, Darcy becomes a prime target. North, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is a stylish writer and a good storyteller who keeps the pages turning. Even as it utilizes some standard retro-future devices, the novel downplays science fiction in favor of a naturalistic and even realistic narrative. As plucky and resourceful as she is melancholic and vulnerable, Darcy is a likable heroine, and the supporting characters add to the book's flavor with their quirks.
An entertaining, stylishly written doomsday novel.Pub Date: May 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-10512-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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by Anna North
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by Anna North
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
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66
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New York Times Bestseller
Booker Prize Winner
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston
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SEEN & HEARD
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