Readers should seek out less pretentious and more original X-Men fanfic online instead.
Proehl (A Hundred Thousand Worlds, 2016, etc.) returns with a literary science fiction novel.
Someone really needs to introduce Proehl to the concept of fan fiction, as all his books to date fall firmly into that realm. His first novel was RPF—real person fiction—about the two stars of TV’s The X-Files. Names and details were changed, but virtually any reader could see that the premise was “What if Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny got married and had a baby?” This second novel, is, well, an X-Men AU—or alternate universe fanfic—which asks: What if the X-Men was literary fiction? Names and details are altered again, but the story is one most readers will know—and one that Proehl must already know himself. Avi realizes his daughter, Emmeline, is more than just precocious—she has abilities beyond his understanding. She attracts the attention of other superpowered people, and soon she’s taken to a special school where she will learn to control what she can do. They call themselves Resonants, and eventually they reveal themselves to the world, but the public quickly fears and despises them for what they are. (There’s also one Resonant who uses his powers for evil and destruction, because of course there is.) The government soon turns against the Resonants, one particularly odious senator pushes to create a registry, and some Resonants are put into government camps. At nearly 500 pages in length, the story suffocates any action with burdensome, put-on prose, culminating in a not-very-satisfying climax and ending. Indeed, at times the entire book feels as if it’s been run through a writing residency algorithm: “He looks up at her, face cherubic with subcutaneous fat and an acceptance of oncoming death.” Or when Fahima, a queer Muslim woman who can effortlessly comprehend mechanical objects and even control them with her mind, can also sense the feelings of appliances: “The aging fridge understood that there was no rest coming for it and wanted only to die.” You and me both, fridge.
Readers should seek out less pretentious and more original X-Men fanfic online instead.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9895-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...
When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.
Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.
Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14861-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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