A long-winded but compelling comic adventure.
A hard-SF story about a multispecies spaceship.
Freeman’s novel centers on the LunaCola H2Liftship and her diverse crew. H2L crafts are powered by hydrogen balloons, rockets, and enormous solar sails, and when readers meet the LunaCola, she’s on a run to Earth from the moon with a minimal crew. That includes the captain, Grace, who’s old-school: “she was not the ‘ho, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum’ type, but still could squeeze everything out the sails, and sometimes the crew.” There’s the first mate, an octopus who has no name that his crew mates can understand (“ripples of red and ochre moved up and down his body, as if guiding the ship along its path through the cosmos”). And foremost in the narrative are the ship’s other crew members: an orangutan named Tang and a dog named Jack, both genetically engineered for higher cognition and speech. As the narrative unfolds, readers follow Jack and Tang on their Earth adventures; Tang is an enthusiastic gambler and has long dreamed of playing at his personal mecca, Las Vegas. Freeman describes his four crewbeings’ time on Earth and then moves the plot outward, following the H2Liftship on its customary routes from terra firma out to the asteroid belt and back, ferrying goods and raw materials—a familiar SF premise that calls to mind James S.A. Corey’s popular Expanse novels, and one that Freeman exploits with verve and maximum readability. Early on, he tells his readers “the story is a wrapper for the addendum, sometimes it works that way”—but it’s rare that it does so in a novel that’s worth reading. Fortunately, his worldbuilding is energetic and intriguing enough to keep readers turning pages. Along the way, Freeman lays on exposition in layers that are almost, but not quite, heavy enough to crush the dramatic momentum. By contrast, Tang and Jack feel somewhat underdeveloped, but the exotic details of their world overcome that obstacle, as well.
A long-winded but compelling comic adventure.Pub Date: March 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-456237-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Indies United Publishing House
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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