An imaginative and thought-provoking tale of human experience, present and past.
An anthropologist encounters a prehistoric man in this SF novel.
Anthropologist and former child prodigy Ruby and her colleague Dr. Steve Reily have done the unthinkable. They’ve broken through the final and greatest barrier to human progress: that of time. In doing so, they’ve accidentally brought three prehistoric humans into the present: a Chalcolithic man (known as Man With Green Eyes for his distinctive feature) and his two children, 10-year-old boy Voice of the Wind and infant girl Mourning Dove. The rest of Green Eyes’ people, the nomadic Soldiers of the Ibex, were recently killed by the settled Metal Men. When oddly dressed strangers appear a few days later, Green Eyes assumes they are Metal Men as well: “Appearing from nowhere, the strange Metal Men who had such powerful magic had hardly moved; had not even run for cover. Great medicine seemed to accompany great stupidity, which seemed impossible. But surely their brains must have fallen out on the ground.” After Green Eyes kills two of her teammates, Ruby—who speaks a reconstructed form of his language—manages to capture him. As she begins to study and understand this 6,000-year-old man, she realizes that she is staring into the face of humanity’s past, present, and future all at once. Hydrick’s (Critical Mass, 2004) prose is elegant and inventive, especially the chapters written from Green Eyes’ perspective: “Blowing wildly in the stiff, cool current of the mountain reaches, Green Eyes felt his pitched bangs wobble under the exhilarating force….Waiting, anticipating, he was not sure what form the battle would take, only that there would be battle.” The plot develops slowly, but it is immediately compelling, and the author smartly alternates between his two protagonists to maximize the sense of collision. The book’s strong philosophical bent is balanced out by the deeply considered and well-dramatized worldview of Green Eyes and the way that it challenges Ruby’s perspective. The novel’s self-aggrandizing title aside, Hydrick has achieved a subtle and realistic work of soft SF that places, in a rather visceral fashion, the human soul at its center.
An imaginative and thought-provoking tale of human experience, present and past.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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