An odd novel that shouldn't work but somehow does.
A police officer connects with a mysterious race of aquatic humans in this inventive debut.
Cara Gray, the protagonist of visual artist Musgrave’s debut novel, took an unlikely route to becoming a cop. She joined an activist camp after school but soon ditched it to join the police force, where she’s initially assigned to work in data surveillance. While she’s good at her job, she fails to prevent a school bombing that kills more than 1,400 people and is demoted, becoming a police liaison to the community of lambdas, a race of small humans that have adapted to living in water. The lambdas “keep a very low profile,” making their homes in flooded basements and working low-income jobs. They’re also the target of increasing harassment and violence from hateful people who believe that a splinter group of militant lambdas were behind the school bombing; they endure beatings and graffiti saying things like “fuck off fishman scum.” Cara becomes increasingly fascinated with the lambdas; meanwhile, the police experiment with a mysterious data processing entity; Cara’s mother interacts with an avatar of her missing husband; and Cara finds herself frustrated at the relationship between her boyfriend and her sentient toothbrush. The novel has an inventive structure, with narrative chapters interspersed with various documents; it can be exhausting, but the reader gets the feeling that’s by design. As weird as the novel sounds, it’s even more so, but Musgrave manages to hold all the threads together, although he does offer readers a healthy number of red herrings and blind alleys. The book is cinematic in an almost Cronenberg-ian way, and even at its most confusing, it’s still a fast-paced (though unsettling) read. Novels like this don’t work unless the author fully commits, and Musgrave does. This isn’t for everybody, but science-fiction readers who favor the bizarre will likely be confused and charmed in equal parts.
An odd novel that shouldn't work but somehow does.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60945-764-8
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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
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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