Engaging characters spearhead a vastly entertaining cross-genre tale.
A devastated kingdom prepares to battle a brutal approaching army in this third installment of Gurgu’s dystopian SF series.
Geo Woodman is the reigning prince of the Silkers kingdom, part of a world that the Black Rains have ravaged. (The Rains turned water into a gel that corroded the flesh of people now called Corrosives.) Geo hopes to bring the city of Torono, which is a veritable “carcass,” back to the flourishing place it once was. But a more pressing issue is the threat of Han the Great, who leads a massive army aimed at Torono. Among his many soldiers are powerful shape-shifting beings—Dreams and the much more vicious Nightmares, which far outnumber the ones in the Silkers kingdom. Geo and others get a taste of the coming battle when invaders raid the city. Meanwhile, Princess Bree, a scientist, looks into the children who’ve been “journeying,” flying (both mentally and, more dangerously, physically) into the pink-clouded sky and well beyond. Gurgu’s series has taken an intriguing route; it began as apocalyptic SF and has gradually incorporated dark fantasy elements. This installment shuffles engaging characters and subplots, from a young man leaving his village and getting caught up with drug dealers to a mysterious sickness showing no signs of slowing down. The narrative threads all intersect in some capacity by the end, with Han’s army remaining an ever-present menace. The author, who excels at crafting gleefully bizarre images, doesn’t disappoint here: there is a colossal stag beetle, Dreams and Nightmares cocoon themselves, and even the general landscape makes an impression (“Morning crept over the ruins’ walls and glass with smudges of pink. It stretched like blood creeping into the night’s darkness”). The gratifying final act offers a worthy resolution with just a hint as to the direction a sequel might take.
Engaging characters spearhead a vastly entertaining cross-genre tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781738659364
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Kult Books
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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