It’s a Western! It’s a revenge play! It’s an environmental critique! Creative, for sure, but also a bit fragmented.
After an apocalyptic meteor shower, Northfall, Minnesota, becomes the nexus of an SF gold rush in this genre-bending tale.
First, there is the cosmic event. On the night a meteor produces "a splash of molten metal like a muddy wave of lava," another tragedy occurs: Hawkin, a young boy, witnesses the murder of his father, then is swept up by the metal, which ultimately becomes absorbed into the deepest structure of his body. Five years later, there’s a rush to mine Omnimetal, a highly volatile substance that may be “the greatest energy source in the world.” Prodigal son John Frontier returns to his wealthy family, which is fighting the mercenary Black Dog Energy company for rights to Gunderson Woods, where the high concentration of Omnimetal has attracted a cult of people who snort space dust and wait to be raptured by an alien power. When John hears about Hawkin, who is being held at a Department of Defense facility and is subjected to terrible experiments, he feels moved to help him. As it turns out, John has secret powers of his own. There are constant echoes of history and pop culture as well as SF and mystery tropes, most notably from Watchmen—like John, Dr. Manhattan has the ability to cause great destruction with his power and must weigh the massive responsibility to safeguard life against his own disgust for human greed. The variety of tones and allusions is entertaining but also prevents the novel from ever settling into a deeper social commentary; there’s just so much, all the time.
It’s a Western! It’s a revenge play! It’s an environmental critique! Creative, for sure, but also a bit fragmented.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-328-54486-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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