Aliens, angels, and an action-hero dad star in a rousing genre mishmash.
This series opener finds a businessman trying to save his family during a war between two extraterrestrial races that threatens Earth.
In Dwyer’s SF fantasy, business executive Jonathan Prescott wins instant fame by being the lone survivor of a terrorist attack. The reason: He has a real guardian angel, the beautiful Angelina, who is at least 50% human, switching between divine and mortal forms. Her Capra-esque mission requires her to undergo various trials before becoming a full angel in heaven. Now, the challenge of Islamic terrorism is quickly dwarfed by a larger menace. Jonathan is in the middle of a conflict between alien armies. Kronogons are advanced, immortal, shape-changing reptiles who look like turtles until they go into fearsome “anaconda” warrior mode. Jonathan has an alliance with TAU, a Kronogon military overlord who has tried to manipulate a succession of American presidents in a fight against enemy ETs called Nardomons. Nardomons are actually the bulbous-headed “Greys” who abduct and mutate inhabitants of Earth and other worlds. In short order, Jonathan has faced many attempts to kill him—by the terrorists, rogue forces in the American government, even some of TAU’s ruthless Kronogon comrades. Finally, TAU, Angelina, and some prominent humans have gotten past mutual distrust to team up. But Jonathan’s wife, Janet, and their children are slain. TAU’s cohorts bring the ensemble to their “Star City” to resurrect Jonathan’s loved ones (Kronogon science can do that), but a Grey raid kidnaps the comatose Prescotts. It seems the terminal cancer afflicting Jonathan’s son appeals to the Greys in their cruel conquest strategies.
The author is adept at keeping things moving and throwing cinematic-level twists into the Robert Ludlum–sized narrative to maintain reader interest. Most miraculously of all, for a story co-starring an angel (with a supporting role by the pope), the inescapable religious elements are kept at a fairly low volume. Some devout fishermen compare Jonathan to Old Testament figures like Jonah and David, and Angelina sometimes mentions the heavenly hosts ranking above her. But there is little of the lengthy sermonizing that is the hallmark of such spiritual fantasies as The Shack. Jonathan does question why a benevolent God would allow a universe to host evil entities like the Greys, but he broods just as much over the secular pitfall of being a workaholic dad who made business meetings a priority over his wife and kids. Angelina registers less as a channel for holy thoughts or Scripture quotes than as a superhero type, restricted in her powers by her half-human side as well as the rule that she is forbidden from using her supernatural powers to smite or kill a foe. (Plus her dialogue, full of mild wisecracks and spunky patter, would be right at home in a comic book.) The two alien races may scheme like Cold War antagonists, but they have enough imaginative touches and exotic cultural details to merit genre respect, say on a Star Trek series level. While it’s the first installment of a series, this volume wraps up its story threads more neatly than other SF sagas, not leaving readers stranded in a ninth circle of cliffhanger hell.
Aliens, angels, and an action-hero dad star in a rousing genre mishmash.Pub Date: April 30, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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