A sometimes-engaging cross between No Country for Old Men and The Twilight Zone.
Along the United States’ southern border, a pregnant, teenage Mexican girl fleeing a murderous criminal crosses paths with an alien life form temporarily stranded on Earth in this sci-fi thriller.
Elena Garcia is a desperate 16-year-old on the run from Chief Ramirez, a crooked, 40-something Mexican cop who raped and impregnated her. If the baby is born and authorities take action against Ramirez, he knows that he’ll become a liability to the narcotics kingpin he serves. Intervening in this situation are two extraordinary visitors, CoWoP and MiLiS, vaguely described, humanoid aliens with elongated heads. The two, a male and a female, are on a long-term orbital mission to monitor Earth, which is considered an undesirable, backwater assignment. A life-support failure aboard their ship forces the aliens to temporarily abandon their physical bodies and send their “essences” into unwary Earth people. While MiLiS is bored inside the body of a Hollywood hedonist, CoWoP goes into Elena, where his presence is mistaken by the girl for “Soldier John,” a folk-saint figure to whose spirit Mexicans appeal for aid and protection. Can this invisible, otherworldly companion give Elena an edge in her seemingly hopeless fight against Ramirez? Sharry (In the Dooryard Bloom’d, 2015, etc.) turns to the sci-fi genre for a tense, terse, action-packed, and timely narrative that crosses space-alien first-contact tropes with a drug-crime nightmare and refugee crisis near the U.S.–Mexican border. Despite some highly sentimental elements, it succeeds more often than not. There’s certainly a lot going on in the story despite the novel’s slim page count. The author grants his aliens personalities, class/caste issues, and slangy battle-of-the-sexes dialogue not unlike earthlings’—a mixed bag that works in some passages better than others. Meanwhile, the vile Ramirez acquires unexpected complexity, and even minor, peripheral figures are surprising. Fortunately, the familiar comparison of outer-space castaways to immigrant newcomers in America is downplayed.
A sometimes-engaging cross between No Country for Old Men and The Twilight Zone.Pub Date: April 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71751-480-6
Page Count: 168
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
