A worthy and thrilling follow-up to The Flight of the Silvers; the wait for Book 3 will be tough to bear.
In the second of a series, a group of people escaping the destruction of our world use their newly discovered superpowers to save both themselves and the parallel world where they’ve landed.
Enough time has passed since the publication of the previous doorstopper-sized volume, The Flight of the Silvers (2014), that Price has helpfully provided a stick figure–decorated recap section on his website (danielprice.info/recap). Our heroes were rescued from San Diego and marked with silver bracelets by a family of time travelers—Semerjean, Esis, and Azral Pelletier—as our world was crushed out of existence. The Silvers find themselves in an alternate America, a racist and isolationist country with terrible movies and awful pizza but with the technology to support flying restaurants and extend the lives of beloved pets for decades. True, now the Silvers all have a unique ability to bend time. But this world, too, is doomed to be destroyed in four years. In the short term, the Gothams, a group of New York–based families with similar powers, think that killing the Silvers will save their world, and a powerful and ruthless government agency is after them. More dangerous still are the Pelletiers; while they’ll often step in to (violently) defend the Silvers, they’re also willing to punish the Silvers for getting romantically involved with one another. Can the Silvers make peace with the Gothams and the government, find the other refugees from their world, discover the Pelletiers’ weak spot, and prevent their adopted world’s destruction? The action is unrelenting, the body count and the emotional toll are high, the revelations are twisty and brutal, and allegiances shift constantly; as in the previous installment, you may need a score card to keep up.
A worthy and thrilling follow-up to The Flight of the Silvers; the wait for Book 3 will be tough to bear.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-16499-6
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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