After a harrowing launch, Honeywell’s tale sails into the doldrums and sinks under the weight of haphazard plotting, uneven...
A sheltered teenager has an existential crisis while riding out the apocalypse aboard her father’s private ark in this dystopian debut novel.
Sixteen-year-old Lalage “Lalla” Paul lives comfortably in a secure flat with her wealthy parents, Anna and Michael. Outside, the environment is in ruins, resources are scarce, and the military-run government performs mass executions to reduce the population. Intent on providing a better life—and eventual death—for his family, Michael purchases a ship, stocks it with supplies, and selects 500 virtuous people to fill its berths; Anna, however, maintains it’s their moral obligation to stay in London and help the less fortunate. When someone shoots Anna through the living room window, Michael and Lalla carry her onto the ship, where she succumbs to her injury. The ship’s passengers then do battle with British troops and a starving mob before heading out to sea. Michael (who becomes a quasi-cult leader known as “Father”) encourages his new flock to forget the past and enjoy the present, but Lalla stubbornly refuses, whining about the lack of adversity, fixating on what’s happening back home, and obsessing over where the ship is headed. Even falling in love isn’t enough to distract the petulant, ungrateful Lalla from her endless cycle of adolescent angst and petty rebellion.
After a harrowing launch, Honeywell’s tale sails into the doldrums and sinks under the weight of haphazard plotting, uneven pacing, and subpar character work.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-46985-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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