Rocke’s (A Twilight in the Morning, 2014) speculative series starter takes a dark look at a world of “fake news.”
In this volume set in the near future, Josh Cunningham is an investigator for the truth-verification division of an organization known as SEH. His job: to determine the origins of major news stories. As the novel opens, he’s assigned to look into the murder-suicide of a Canadian man who was supposedly infected with “The Disease,” the latest rumored global pandemic. However, try as he might, Josh can’t explain away the outbreak as a mere fabrication. While following up on another Disease-related suicide in Savannah, Georgia, he meets Jim Burillo, who offers his own conspiracy theories on the brewing epidemic. Josh then contacts his old classmate, research chemist Luke Baer, who won’t admit to what he knows about a suspicious group known only as CDV. Along the way, Josh’s division gets shut down, and some people whom he knows either die or disappear. Then Josh himself is abducted, and his kidnappers get him hooked on a new drug. As the Disease spreads, global panic sets in. Events come to a head as the book ends, but the conclusion offers little resolution. Some readers may wish that the author had wrapped up a few more plotlines in such a dense novel, and the fact that it takes nearly 400 pages to reveal the conspiracy behind the Disease is disappointing. Still, Rocke’s vigorous pace makes the volume seem shorter than it is, and it offers an important examination of what happens to the truth in a world full of fakery. When the average citizen believes in nothing, the book warns, it allows people in power to drive narratives as they see fit. Rocke also presents fully developed characters in Josh, Luke, and Jim, although the villains’ motivations are less clear—as they should be.
A thought-provoking prediction of where constant misinformation can eventually lead.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68433-420-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2020
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
From Australian Moriarty (The Last Anniversary, 2006, etc.), domestic escapism about a woman whose temporary amnesia makes her re-examine what really matters to her.
Alice wakes from what she thinks is a dream, assuming she is a recently married 29-year-old expecting her first child. Actually she is 39, the mother of three and in the middle of an acrimonious custody battle with her soon-to-be ex-husband Nick. She’s fallen off her exercise bike, and the resulting bump on her head has not only erased her memory of the last 10 years but has also taken her psychologically back to a younger, more easygoing self at odds with the woman she gathers she has become. While Alice-at-29 is loving and playful if lacking ambition or self-confidence, Alice-at-39 is a highly efficient if too tightly wound supermom. She is also thin and rich since Nick now heads the company where she remembers him struggling in an entry-level position. Alice-at-29 cannot conceive that she and Nick would no longer be rapturously in love or that she and her adored older sister Elisabeth could be estranged, and she is shocked that her shy mother has married Nick’s bumptious father and taken up salsa dancing. She neither remembers nor recognizes her three children, each given a distinct if slightly too cute personality. Nor does she know what to make of the perfectly nice boyfriend Alice-at-39 has acquired. As memory gradually returns, Alice-at-29 initially misinterprets the scattered images and flashes of emotion, especially those concerning Gina, a woman who evidently caused the rift with Nick. Alice-at-29 assumes Gina was Nick’s mistress, only to discover that Gina was her best friend. Gina died in a freak car accident and in her honor, Alice-at-39 has organized mothers from the kids’ school to bake the largest lemon meringue pie on record. But Alice-at-29 senses that Gina may not have been a completely positive influence. Moriarty handles the two Alice consciousnesses with finesse and also delves into infertility issues through Elizabeth’s diary.
Cheerfully engaging.Pub Date: June 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-15718-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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