A skillfully rendered but overly ambitious medical thriller.
A mysterious disease is gradually sterilizing men, and a federal health worker struggles to find out why in this debut novel.
Al Jackson is a project manager for the Federal Office of Health and Disease in Atlanta, and he’s accustomed to being assigned dreary, uninteresting cases. However, this time he’s been given one that turns out to have high stakes. There’s a significant drop in pregnancies in a small town in Massachusetts, and the culprit seems to be male infertility, though it’s bafflingly unclear what the root cause of it is. Al pores over piles of potentially relevant data to no avail. Meanwhile, Massachusetts resident Mary Alice Hennigan tragically loses her daughter, the victim of a brutal rape, to a botched abortion attempt. Mary joins an activist group called the United Anti-Abortion League and zealously ascends to its top position. She radicalizes the group quickly, darkly casting their mission in the language of war and candidly condoning violent resistance. She interprets the sterilization epidemic as a punishment from God: “He told me He is not pleased with America....He no longer can tolerate our self-centered ways. And so He had taken away the gift of procreation.” Although this is ultimately a mystery/thriller, Meehan doesn’t neglect the development of his characters. Al, for example, is lost in personal chaos—he’s habitually unfaithful to his wife, discontented at work, and struggles to cultivate meaningful connections to his children. Meanwhile, his wife, Julia, is having an affair and considering leaving Al for her paramour. Also, Mary’s extremism seems to stem from not only recent tragedy, but also from past trauma. Overall, this is a thoughtful, intelligently crafted narrative. However, the plot often skips jarringly from past to present, and it takes far too long for its basic elements to become clear as Meehan crams in too many ancillary themes. The main mystery develops suspensefully, though, which compensates for the surfeit of drama.
A skillfully rendered but overly ambitious medical thriller.Pub Date: July 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5308-4222-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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