by Beth Duke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 14, 2024
An unusual time-hopping tale which will appeal to SF and music fans alike.
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In Duke’s SF novel, a 30-something woman from the 22nd century time-travels to experience Woodstock and visit a famous ancestor.
Joan Baez Smith, nicknamed “Baezy” (“rhymes with daisy”), is very excited about her upcoming birthday present. Her physicist mother has used her connections to allow her to pass through a Time Insertion Protocol portal to go back to Bethel, New York, in 1969 to see the famed Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Not only will Baezy get to see Joan Baez perform, but she’ll also get to meet her distant relative, Kelly Jean Adams, whose mathematical genius set the world on the path to the future utopia in which Baezy lives. In a flash, Baezy travels from December 13, 2101, to August 15th, 1969, falling right into the path of Jack Warren, the best friend of Baezy’s great-great-great-grandmother. She meets Kelly’s traveling group and introduces herself as Sarah Sandoval, an alias that the Time Insertion Protocol employees found for her. As Sarah, Baezy gets to enjoy the music of Woodstock, the food of the time period, and the kindness of strangers brought together by the one-of-a-kind event. However, she didn’t expect that she wouldn’t get along with her ancestor, and that she’d find herself falling in love with Jack. In this offbeat time-travel novel, readers and music lovers alike will delight in the Woodstock-set scenes, as well as all the references to famous musicians who played there, including Baezy’s namesake: “Sarah jumped to her feet when Joan began belting the chorus, her voice washing over the crowd clear and strong.” Overall, this book is both a nostalgic and occasionally critical ode to the 1969 music scene and an SF novel about a futuristic society altering the flow of the past, and it manages to weave the two elements together in an entertaining way. The specific focus on the Woodstock music festival gives this novel a unique spin that genre aficionados are likely to enjoy.
An unusual time-hopping tale which will appeal to SF and music fans alike.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2024
ISBN: 9798218517199
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The Art of Dixie
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by John Scalzi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2023
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.
Some people are born supervillains, and others have supervillainy thrust upon them.
Charlie Fitzer, a former business journalist–turned–substitute teacher, is broke and somewhat desperate. His circumstances take an unexpected and dangerous turn when his estranged uncle Jake dies, leaving his business—i.e., his trillion-dollar supervillain empire—to Charlie. Charlie doesn’t really have the skills or experience to manage the staff of the volcano lair, and matters don’t improve when he’s pressured to attend a high-level meeting with other supervillains, none of whom got along with his uncle. With the aid of his uncle’s No. 1, Mathilda Morrison, and his cat, Hera (who turns out to be an intelligent and typing-capable spy for his uncle’s organization), Charlie must sort out whom he can trust before he gets blackmailed, blown up, or both. This book serves as a follow-up of sorts to Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society (2022) in that both are riffs on genre film tropes. The current work is fluffier and sillier than the previous novel and, indeed, many of Scalzi’s other books, although there is the occasional jab about governments being in bed with unscrupulous corporate enterprises or the ways in which people can profit from human suffering. This is one of many available stories about a good-hearted Everyman thrust into fantastical circumstances, struggling to survive as a fish out of water, and, while well executed for its type, the plot doesn’t go anywhere that will surprise you.
Fun while it lasts but not one of Scalzi’s stronger books.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780765389220
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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