Action-laden tale of characters with special talents and equally interesting problems.
Borders’ debut adventure features a world of feared people with powers and various factions searching for those behind a major city’s destruction.
Eighteen-year-old Jared Butler is traveling with fellow high schoolers to the country of Redarctica. Military types stop their bus for a supposed routine check, taking blood samples to see if anyone has special abilities. Surprisingly, someone does, and an explosive confrontation with the soldiers leaves a few students dead and Jared unconscious. He awakens in the company of Dr. Mirkov, who’s recruiting the teen into an army because of his power to heal, which is news to Jared. After a gunshot or two validates his newfound ability, Jared trains with Patrick, another survivor from the bus incident, and the mysterious May. Mirkov forces them all to cooperate, via imbedded “pain chips,” with the government agency Grey Snow. The doctor believes something must be done about the growing population of individuals with abilities. In fact, someone’s ability run amok is the alleged reason for a calamitous energy release in Sunlight City, where Jared lives in the Consolidated States of Newland. He has a chance to return to his home country, but he’ll have to assassinate someone at Grey Snow’s order. This will help the agency aid powerful organization Black Rain in covering up its involvement in the city’s devastation. Unfortunately, the assassination doesn’t go smoothly for Jared, Patrick, and May, pitting them against others with abilities, including a man who shoots projectiles from his hands. Jared also hopes to cure his comatose little sister, Lilly, somewhere in the C.S. Though brimming with superpowers, Borders’ story often concentrates on the characters’ human sides. Jared, for one, faces the dilemma of completing a mission for Black Rain, which, if the organization is responsible for destroying Sunlight City, has also caused his parents’ deaths. Many struggle to understand the abilities: Jared learns he’s capable of more than simply healing, and he and others like him have assorted labels: “specials,” the “Empowered,” and “The Gifted.” The wide-ranging abilities are fascinating even if readers have seen them before. May, for example, can send clones (or surrogates) to fight while she’s relatively safe elsewhere. The abilities do occasionally swamp the dramatic potential: more than one reputedly dead character turns up later irrefutably alive. The second half, meanwhile, is rife with action and suspense. Borders vigorously details characters unleashing powers or on the verge of doing so: “What had always felt like a raging inferno inside of him that he had to keep at bay was now a torch he could wield however he so chose.” Despite a world filled with unheard-of lands (e.g., Feezeland), the dialogue is generally contemporary; Patrick unabashedly drops a few “for reals?” Borders’ playful title will have readers examining what exactly a bad guy is, while the ending offers both resolution and room for sequels.
Action-laden tale of characters with special talents and equally interesting problems.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 191
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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