An enjoyable novel that deals with timely issues but falls short in complex worldbuilding.
Two young women living on a distant planet are linked by an ancient book whose protagonist serves as a role model as they struggle to overcome their individual circumstances.
Born into a cultlike community known as Seagate, 16-year-old Beatrice Bolano wrestles with her illicit fascination with food. Seagate is run by the ALGN Church, a sect that extols starvation as a form of worship. Followers refrain from eating in public, take appetite suppressants, and exile people who aren’t skinny enough. When Beatrice decides she's ready to take the enormous step of fleeing Seagate, a kindhearted black-market cookbook dealer helps spirit her away. Interwoven with Beatrice’s story is that of Reiko Rimando, a talented artist from a poor family who wins a full scholarship to college. Over time, Reiko becomes disillusioned with academia, realizing her classmates are mainly rich kids who couldn't care less about hitting the books. Jettisoning her aboveboard professional ambitions, she puts her youth, beauty, and intelligence to work as a con artist until a love affair threatens to shatter her hopes of making a financially independent life for herself. Both Beatrice and Reiko eventually find their ways to a centuries-old book called The Kitchen Girl, an autobiography by a woman named Ijo, that ends up shaping both of their trajectories. Chapters from The Kitchen Girl are interspersed throughout the novel but don’t appear frequently enough to comprise a complete narrative thread. While engrossing, the novel is hampered by weak dialogue and a thinly drawn setting. Occasional references to multiple moons, airships, and a race of Indigenous residents known as the Free-Wah aren’t enough to make the planet Beatrice, Reiko, and Ijo inhabit come alive as a fictional world with its own history, culture, and place in the cosmos. Rather, their planet feels like a facsimile for modern Earth that serves as a staging ground for an exploration of real crises: climate change, income inequality, systemic racism, corporate dominance, religious fundamentalism, the outlandish cost of higher education, and more.
An enjoyable novel that deals with timely issues but falls short in complex worldbuilding.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781668000199
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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