The setting is well-captured, but it’s slow going in this sci-fi adventure.
In a militaristic future Korea, a boy and girl meet.
It is 2199, and Korea, China, and Japan no longer exist as separate countries but as members of the Neo Council (conveyed to readers in infodumps). Five decades of war have yielded many innovations, such as the God Machines (riffing on the tradition of Japanese mecha movies and Pacific Rim). Preparing to take his military placement exam before graduation from an elite academy, Jaewon is isolated: his father is dead, his mother abandoned him, and his former best friend has turned his back on Jaewon to gain power in one of the Old Seoul gangs. Jaewon’s military posting is to the Tower, the kilometer-tall building in Neo Seoul that serves as headquarters, where he is assigned to supervise Tera, a girl whose strength has been enhanced with drugs in order to pilot a new kind of God Machine. With war still raging and rebel nationalists seeking to make Korea an independent nation again, will two young people be able to find love in this plot-heavy story? While Jaewon is an effective character, much of the supporting cast is relatively flat and the dialogue occasionally stilted, which jars against the mostly colloquial flow.
The setting is well-captured, but it’s slow going in this sci-fi adventure. (glossary) (Science fiction. 14-16)Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62014-299-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tu Books
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Twists aplenty in a gorefest replete with violent emotions and events.
Four savagely bullied ninth graders suddenly acquire superpowers.
Christian, proudly out as lesbian since sixth grade, and her friends—geeky Micah, mousy Gabby, and uptight Jamie—inadvertently open an interdimensional hole by playing with an old book of spells. It somehow leaves them with a diverse mix of abilities, from shooting flames to flying. Only Micah burns to repay their trio of bullies for years of pantsing, swirlies, threats, and humiliating pranks. The other three take broader views, which turns out to be a good thing, as a cunning, telepathic, blood-sucking monster from another dimension has also come through the hole to crush heads and feed on residents of their small Arkansas town. Riley goes for the gusto, opening with raw language and vividly explicit incidents of bullying followed by rising general terror punctuated by sprays of blood. He also stirs in some juicy complications, as tracking and battling the monster requires the self-styled Freaks not only to learn to control their powers and rein in the half-deranged Micah, but somehow find a way to work with one of the bullies who had been lurking near the spellcasting and has come away with superstrength and the emotional stability of the Hulk. Both unresolved internal conflicts and the revelation that there are more monsters out there promise further entries. Christian and Micah present White; Gabby is Jewish and Latina, and Jamie is African American.
Twists aplenty in a gorefest replete with violent emotions and events. (Horror. 14-16)Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-945501-53-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Imbrifex Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
Adolescent issues compete for attention with monsters, not all nonhuman, in this grimdark sequel.
Defeating a blood-sucking monster from another dimension turns out to be only the warm-up for a team of superpowered teens.
Their efforts to expand their newly acquired powers while keeping them secret and playing surveillance games with a hostile unit of government men enter a more active phase for the six self-dubbed Freaks with the sudden appearance of scores of eerily alert rabbits in their small Arkansas town. At the same time, the arrival of a new classmate, nonbinary Latinx Bec Villalobos, roils the hormonal waters for both White lesbian Christian and African American brainiac Jamie. Angry, traumatized Micah, who is White, falls under the sway of his sinister great-uncle Baltar—a stranger with a weirdly compelling voice and a murky but plainly evil agenda. All three developments prove hard challenges to the team’s already fragile cohesiveness. But a series of increasingly violent encounters (interspersed with Micah’s flashbacks to his mother’s dismemberment by a monster in the previous volume) culminate in a face-off with an ancient, powerful shape-shifting trickster out to wreak vengeance for the persecution of local Indigenous nations. Along with brutal scenes of torture and bloodshed (not to mention references to at least eight more lurking supernatural foes to feed future episodes), Riley weaves explorations of anger issues and budding romance as well as forthrightly confronted themes of racial, religious, and class conflict.
Adolescent issues compete for attention with monsters, not all nonhuman, in this grimdark sequel. (Horror fantasy. 14-16)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-945501-47-0
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Imbrifex Books
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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