An engaging military/SF tale that flies familiar skies confidently.
The American military recruits teenagers as pilots for secret aircraft in this YA adventure.
It’s 2035, and 14-year-old Syd Yazzie lives in Holly, Michigan. She shares a trailer with her drug-addled mom, Spirit, and younger brothers, Liam, 9; and Logan, 7. Syd’s escape from the pressure of raising two rambunctious boys is her Xbox Nittrus gaming system, on which she plays “Metal Shark Apocalypse.” Syd is a top scorer in the virtual reality game that pits giant mechs—“robot-like machines with pilots inside”—against intergalactic enemies. This brings her to the attention of Gen. Rosen. As Russia and China begin invading the rest of Asia and Eastern Europe, Rosen brings Col. Nathan “Rip” Marcello out of retirement from the Air Force. Rip flies from Gordon, Texas, to Michigan to recruit Syd for a special program for those who excel in video games. He offers Spirit $5 million, and she immediately signs Syd into the program to be a “product tester.” With no social life to speak of, Syd worries only for her brothers in her absence. At her new school, she meets fellow gamers Annabel, Kaylie, and Linzi. Syd also comes face to face with Ethan Tanner, the brilliant player known online as “Xdethb4failreX.” The handsome Ethan patronizingly hits on Syd in the cafeteria. As the students secretly train for war on virtual battlefields, Rip brings in the reluctant Dr. Amanda Saxe to advise on their emotional well-being. Soon, the world’s real war heats up, and the true nature of the military’s A.D.A.M. project won’t stay hidden for long.
In Golembiewski’s series opener, A.D.A.M. stands for “Adolescent Driven Assault Mech.” Fans of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985) and Japan’s Gundamfranchise will find much to enjoy in this gritty military thriller/SF fusion. Readers learn in the early chapters from Syd’s perspective that the United States remains in decline, where “the car factories—now building only electric vehicles—were running strong, yet people were miserable. Minimum wage was the best most would do.” Her graffiti-tagged school in Holly is like an “old dog, malnourished and in bad need of a bath.” Syd’s love for the punk rockers The Sex Pistols adds to the grimy 1970s atmosphere. Other chapters are from Rip’s perspective and begin with a focus on his wife, Camellia, and the idyllic retirement that’s been put on pause. His upbeat outlook is captured in the line “There was too much world to enjoy even if it was becoming a wasteland.” The prevalence of smartwatches over phones is the main indicator of a future timeline. The key political details regarding the war are that Communist regimes had “taken over all of Asia and India” and “our gutless politicians allowed them to spread their red faction with little resistance.” A major revelation in Ender’s Gamemerges in Golembiewski’s tale with a twist about the aircraft’s thrilling “Guardian mode.” At one point, Syd relates: “The aircraft vibrated, my body shaking as pieces moved about, the exterior of the ship changing...the engines now thrusting against the earth coming from the feet of the giant mech I was piloting.” With the setup accomplished, the sequel will hopefully further exploit the large cast’s potential and broaden the narrative scope.
An engaging military/SF tale that flies familiar skies confidently.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 207
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
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