A remarkable tale of the frightening consequences of hatred and discrimination.
Citizens rebel against a British dictatorship and military forces that incarcerate people with dark skin in this dystopian novel.
Nearly a decade ago, Jack and Jenny Brackstone’s father left his family to avoid being sent to a prison camp simply because he was Iranian. As their mother is a government official, the siblings are relatively safe. But once the prime minister disbands Parliament, they must evade armed Patrol officers. While fleeing, Jack and Jenny split up. She winds up in the tunnels underneath York and surprisingly reunites with her father, who’s now part of The Fifth, a resistance group. The Fifth trains members in martial arts and weapons to combat the Booted Troops marching above them. Jack and his mother, meanwhile, take refuge with the British Liberation Army in Scotland. As Jenny tries harnessing her mental and physical strength to prove herself, Jack, as a BLA cadet, endures bullies. Although both The Fifth and the BLA are anti-government, their alliance isn’t exactly stable since not everyone is trustworthy. A battle between the rebels and soldiers seems unavoidable, and the Brackstones will have to fight to bring their family back together. Sykes delivers a distinctive but understated social novel. For example, he largely implies the racial-fueled hostility behind the prison camps. Similarly, there are few profanities and no lingering on the violence during the tale’s periodic action sequences. Still, certain scenes are potent. The Fifth raids a government-sponsored lab that cruelly experiments on gorillas, and a particularly distraught character resorts to self-mutilation. While the author’s pithy writing keeps the story moving, Sykes truly excels at unexpected turns regarding both the plot and cast. Some characters, for example, aren’t as amiable as they seem, and more than one death is genuinely shocking. This book, even with its stark ending, could either be a stand-alone or a series opener.
A remarkable tale of the frightening consequences of hatred and discrimination.Pub Date: June 23, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-72-340973-6
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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