An engrossing tale that offers intriguing reflections about humanity’s future.
A futuristic debut novel focuses on an affluent family in Ireland.
Sparling’s story is set in Ireland in the 2800s. Although Dublin is now large enough to have an Old Dublin and a New Dublin and robots are capable of robbing banks, people, more or less, act as they do today. Young people still go to universities, and some families are enormously wealthy. One such family is the O’Hare clan. The O’Hares have an immense amount of money thanks to a “Baked Fresh” brand of bread. But money doesn’t shield them from tragedy. When Ian O’Hare is at the University of Dublin, he meets a drug dealer named Jeff T. Ortez. Jeff owns a certain curiosity: a suicide pill that will kill the person who takes it and be completely untraceable. Ian is intrigued. He’s also jealous of his brother Mike’s relationship with a beautiful young woman named Louise. Ian purchases the pill and uses it to kill his brother. Unbeknownst to Ian, Louise is pregnant with Mike’s child. Still, Ian manages to persuade Louise to become his wife. She gives birth to Mike’s son, a boy called Simon. Later, she bears Ian a child, named Luke. The story follows the paths of Simon and Luke as they make their way in the world. By 2819, the planet experiences increasing chaos. Eventually, a political organization known as the New World Order emerges. The NWO is keen on placing microchips under the skins of all citizens. The group is endorsed publicly by Jeff. Surely, humanity is headed in a dangerous direction.
Sparling’s ever-expanding story of the O’Hares and the world in which they live comes to include clones, a cult that carries out assassinations, and a plant that’s guaranteed to destabilize “the world order.” Readers will never be quite sure what will be thrown into the mix next. Just as it seems the main action will concern Ian and the secret murder of his brother, events shift. While readers will find the ending to be completely unexpected from the initial pages, some bland language can make getting to that conclusion a lengthy process. Several descriptions, such as how a character speaks in “a grave and serious manner” and has a demeanor that comes “from a place of deep suffering,” don’t offer much in the way of nuance. The dialogue can also be a bit flat. When Luke is asked about his job, he responds bluntly: “I work at a coffee shop on Raglan Road.” Still, the novel includes many lines worth contemplating. For those who fear new technology, the story points out that “once self-driving cars were invented, people didn’t imagine driving ever again.” One character considers how life is “a constant state of ascendance. Some think it is a slow decay. No. They are wrong. It is an ascendance.” Such ideas add a heady quality to what is ultimately a strange, absorbing, and surprising tale. Even amid the robots and clones, people in the 2800s are still trying to grapple with the challenges of existence.
An engrossing tale that offers intriguing reflections about humanity’s future.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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