Well-intentioned but disturbing in its portrayal of the disabled protagonist.
A dog and a teen boy seek safety after a civil war brings massive death.
Tao the dog regains consciousness in a house of horrors. Hauling himself upstairs on a badly injured leg, he sees that the Woman, Man, and Girl are all dead. The Reparation Party forces have rampaged through the house leaving alive only Tao and Kasper, the neuroatypical, cognitively disabled teenage son of the house. Tao and Kasper can’t communicate but must flee, so they begin a dreadful journey through a White-default city ravaged by civil war and filled with mutilated corpses (a fictionalized version of current post-pandemic politics ramped up to a genocidal extreme). It’s total victory for the racist, homophobic Reps, who repeatedly use a slur to refer to Kasper. The imagery-packed narration switches between Tao’s and Kasper’s points of view as well as that of an omniscient narrator who understands more than either. This moody piece about surviving in a war zone is kind and supportive of disabled Kasper, but it portrays him as barely human (though deserving of love). Many of his utterances are spelled phonetically, othering his communications, sapping his words of meaning, and contributing to the alien feeling of his overall portrayal. Tao, meanwhile, has a semimagical power and decent understanding of the situation; he’s the leader, the character with a growth arc, and, as he has the last word, he’s treated as more competent and understandable than the boy.
Well-intentioned but disturbing in its portrayal of the disabled protagonist. (Speculative fiction. 16-18)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-88971-426-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Nightwood Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
This gender-fluid tale opens a dystopian series on a high note.
This first installment of a YA SF trilogy introduces a teenage girl in North America’s post-apocalyptic future who must masquerade as a boy to serve as the absolute leader of an isolated realm.
In Shay’s dystopian tale, it is 2185, more than a century after climate change, mass extinctions, and nuclear war ravaged Earth. Surviving nations, facing shortages, infertility, and cancer cutting down populations, have agreed to “Eco-Crisis Accords” that pledge rollbacks on all that brought about civilization’s ruin. Now, they forbid electricity and other advanced technology, international travel, and representational democracy. Instead of parliaments and congresses, an “Elected” family serves 100-year terms, with men taking charge at age 18 to enforce the Accords. In struggling, cloistered East Country—which includes what used to be Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and the Chesapeake Bay—first-person narrator Aloy and her dynasty occupy the White House, enjoying veneration, food, and no-longer-manufactured medication. But there is a price. The girl’s heir-apparent brother, Evan, ran away, leaving the inner circle no choice but to disguise Aloy as a boy, complete with an arranged fiancee, Vienne. Dutifully, Aloy ascends to the office of Elected on her 18th birthday and prepares for the sham marriage to the lovely, faithful Vienne while also earning the respect of the populace by fighting rising discontent from a faction that demands restoration of industry. In addition, outsiders may be causing trouble on the border. While there are plenty of intriguing ingredients in this YA hero-fronted novel, the story does take sexual elements, including the Sapphic, a bit beyond the usual PG-13 territory. (But nothing gets graphic, as it seems Aloy, while educated in everything else, has never been taught exactly how babies are made.) There are abundant incidents and crises packed into a fairly tight page count. It makes a bit of a difference that the antagonists—at least in this installment—are not Hunger Games–style sadistic elite castes or power-mad dictators. They are just people in extreme circumstances trying to do the morally correct things for the greater good to flourish, even when devotion to duty means deceit and cruelty (plus some evidently great sex). A big to-be-continued hangs over the finale.
This gender-fluid tale opens a dystopian series on a high note.Pub Date: April 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73204-790-7
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An overly complex, disorganized work with some mixed handling of diversity.
A futuristic vision of an unsustainable Earth.
A diverse group of four protagonists—Mercy Adams, Van Elder, and siblings TJ and Eddie LeRoux—together bring their varied narrative voices and skill sets to this novel’s world of political intrigue. Due to climate change, Earth is now called Scorch. In response to a fertility crisis, scientists created the praenex, humans who have telepathy, precognition, rapid maturation rates, and the ability to talk directly to the Creator via a sensory organ in their foreheads. Large humans called sapiens coexist with the smaller praenex and rely on them for guidance. Over time, Scorch has become divided into two political factions: Terrans believe that the planet can be healed through science, while Pilgrims, who outnumber them, believe that humans should colonize outer space. Major and minor characters regularly introduce themselves along with their pronouns, although they do this inconsistently and at times repetitively. Descriptions of characters’ skin color are also abundant throughout the text, emphasizing the world’s wide-ranging racial and ethnic groups. Some of the language used seems to undermine the goal of inclusivity, however. The novel’s multitude of storylines create a disorienting reading experience that is intensified by the confusing worldbuilding, poorly handled flashbacks, overuse of opaque dialect, the manner of introducing and defining invented terminology, and switches between multiple points of view.
An overly complex, disorganized work with some mixed handling of diversity. (Science fiction. 16-18)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781958051733
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Snowy Wings Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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