People do a lot of weeping in this book. Maybe that’s meant to compensate for its lack of emotional depth.
Imagine a more benign Brave New World yoked with a short love story from a New Yorker back issue.
Originally published as a digital novel, this collaboration of novelist Adrian (The Great Night, 2011, etc.) and former McSweeney’s publisher Horowitz is an unwieldy hybrid of domestic romance and science fiction speculating on the prospect of immortality through decapitation. (And no, you didn’t misread that.) Jane Cotton, a pediatric surgeon at a New York hospital, is having enough trouble coping with the death of her husband, Jim, a chaplain working at the same hospital. What makes matters worse is finding out that his corpse is missing its head, which has been cryogenically preserved by an enigmatic corporation called Polaris. Through an appropriately icy company spokesman named Brian, who apologizes to Jane for her “perceived loss,” Jane finds out that Jim’s frozen cranium is being preserved and stored for reattachment and restoration at some undetermined date in the distant future. The chapters concerning Jane’s frantic quest for more information, legal redress, and (she hopes) Jim’s head alternate for the most part with chapters that seem to be set in that aforementioned future in which Jim is in a painful struggle of his own as he adjusts to a new physical form while trying to retain whatever memories he has of his previous life. A disembodied voice named Alice tries to get Jim 2.0 to adjust to a world where money, among other things, “hasn’t existed for a while.” It’s possible to interpret Adrian and Horowitz’s gimmick as a scenario for a hypothetical breakthrough in biotechnology, along with its potential ramifications. It’s also possible to interpret this new world as an old-school metaphor for reincarnation and its own hypothetical discontents. But until the book’s latter two sections, which seem to move backward instead of forward in time, you don’t care enough about any of the novel’s characters to even begin considering its ideas.
People do a lot of weeping in this book. Maybe that’s meant to compensate for its lack of emotional depth.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-22181-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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