An engaging, personality-driven tale with detailed SF worldbuilding.
In this second installment of an SF series, colonists on an alien world face unexpected perils.
Wretlind’s sequel, following Out of Due Season (2022), is set on the alien world of Tishbe, to which a fugitive group of the 241 followers of Father Elijah Jonas had fled when he led them away from the violent shambles of Earth. Life had been hard but predictable in their settlement, the City of Nod, for the ensuing 39 years, but as this installment opens, that seems to be changing. Lake beds that have been dry for decades (the colony usually only gets about 10 inches of rain a year) begin to fill with water, and caves seem to be inhabited by vicious alien entities the colonists haven’t seen before. These alterations split the settlement elders, some of whom believe they’re harbingers of a planetary “Shift” while others dismiss their significance. Caught in these rifts—and in the broader changes engulfing their new world—is the engrossing book’s core cast of vivid characters: “clumsy and weak” apprentice scribe Micah Victor; budding engineer Joel Page; reluctant medic Christina Grigsby; 20-year-old Miriam Michaels, who’s been thrust unexpectedly into the status of family matriarch; and a handful of others. When this group embarks on a journey across the unknown regions of this world, it unearths clues to a deeper mystery than any of the colony’s elders ever imagined. Wretlind does a skillful job of interweaving the personal conflicts of his young main characters with the marvels they find (and the dangers they face) as they explore Tishbe’s wildlands in search of answers about the Shift. And Tishbe itself, “a fantastical world with wonders yet to be discovered,” is deftly delineated and will keep readers turning the pages.
An engaging, personality-driven tale with detailed SF worldbuilding.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-08-794916-1
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning.
An intrepid teen encounters the dark secrets of the elite in her climate-ravaged world in this translated work from South Korea.
Sixteen-year-old Jeon Chobahm is shocked to learn that Goh Haeri, the beloved reality TV star who happens to be Chobahm’s look-alike, just died by suicide—and also that she’s being asked to become Haeri’s secret replacement. In their frozen, post-apocalyptic world, Chobahm, like everyone around her, leads a bleak life. She bundles up daily against the dangerous cold and toils in a power plant. But now she’ll live Haeri’s cushy life in Snowglobe, an exclusive, glass-dome-enclosed community, where the climate is mild, and the resident actors’ lives are broadcast as entertainment for those in the open world. As glamorous as life there may seem, however, Chobahm quickly learns that there’s a sinister underbelly: People are killed off when they’re no longer useful, and there’s something strange about Haeri’s family dynamics. As she meets a host of new companions, including Yi Bonwhe, the heir of Snowglobe’s founding family, Chobahm discovers a devastating secret and embarks on a risky plan to expose the truth. Climate change, societal inequity, and the ethics of escaping from our own lives by watching others’ are addressed in this intelligent, absorbing book. Chobahm is a complex character inhabiting a strongly developed world, and her compassion, ambition, outrage, and sorrow ring true.
Transporting and unputdownable; an appealing combination of deep and page-turning. (Dystopian. 12-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593484975
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
