A far-reaching, thoughtful and laser-filled adventure influenced by Asimov and other interstellar classics.
Byykkonen’s debut sci-fi novel centers on a young girl and her unexpected abilities.
Qassi is 14 when her mother asks a spice smuggler named Vinson to take her to her grandmother’s. What should be a simple trip on the planet Hazhur instead turns into a life-altering event when Vinson’s Hak-9 automobile tumbles off the highway—an event Vinson dreads not so much for the impact as for the fact that he and Qassi are now on the surface of Hazhur. Those who can afford it live far above in “clusters of elegant skyscrapers”; only the poor and dangerous dwell on the ground among the “fields of garbage.” When Vinson encounters a crashed alien ship, a band of thugs—“low even among humankind”—and two telepathic agents find the pair, and one of the male aliens wounds Qassi with a sword. Though the wound initially appears fatal, the contents of a stuffed toy animal, given by an alien and slashed open during the attack, have a strange effect on Qassi. In short order, she not only recovers but becomes “dahlu’nar. Immortal, invulnerable, and incorruptible.” As Qassi develops new abilities including glowing eyes and telepathy, a group of sinister aliens are bent on her destruction as well as the destruction of mankind—“humans had been blithely going about their lives, totally oblivious to a powerful and brutal alien presence that had been…patiently awaiting permission to begin a routine extermination.” Full of philosophical inquiry (“In fact, individual humans didn’t even understand their own selves, which was very hard to imagine. How could one be a stranger to oneself?”) and rocket-fueled sci-fi, the story provides its share of unexpected twists and explosions. Some descriptions—“The small fleet of fifty-two ships dropped down from superluminal velocity and opened up with lasers, MAK cannons, particle beam projectors, a variety of missiles, and even a few torpedoes and bombs”—may seem like overkill to casual fans of the genre, but readers excited by the combination of mysterious alien powers and futuristic warfare will find plenty of both.
A far-reaching, thoughtful and laser-filled adventure influenced by Asimov and other interstellar classics.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2015
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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