Willis has a delightful comic voice, but it’s hard to imagine who the audience is supposed to be for this book. Concerned...
A passionate rant about books being lost to changing document-preservation practices, lightly disguised as a novella.
Willis (Crosstalk, 2016, etc.) may be best known for her vast time-travel fantasies, which she typically spins out over five or six hundred pages; this 88-page story is being published as a stand-alone. The narrator, Jim, a blogger with a tenuous grasp of Manhattan geography, has come to town to meet with publishers about his blog, Gone for Good, which celebrates the disappearance of outdated technologies such as payphones and VHS tapes. It would be fine with him if bookstores were to die out, he tells a radio interviewer, “because it would mean that society didn’t need them anymore, just like it stopped needing buggy whips and elevator operators, so it shed them, just like a snake sheds its skin.” Losing his way in a cloudburst, he takes refuge in what he takes for an old-fashioned used bookshop. For some reason, a frenetically busy employee offers to give him a tour; the establishment turns out to be vast, full of obscure titles like Herman Melville’s The Isle of the Cross and Jim’s childhood favorite, Ambush in Apache Canyon. Readers will immediately grasp what takes Jim dozens of pages to understand (perhaps because, unlike us, he doesn’t know he’s a character in a fantasy): that this is no shop but a magical repository for books whose every copy has been destroyed.
Willis has a delightful comic voice, but it’s hard to imagine who the audience is supposed to be for this book. Concerned bibliophiles will find far more coherent nonfiction discussions of literary loss—Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold springs to mind—while fans of Willis' fiction should probably stick to her novels, which feature fully drawn characters instead of straw men.Pub Date: April 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59606-876-6
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
PROFILES
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BOOK TO SCREEN
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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