A confrontational story of isolation and abuse.
In Smith’s near-future SF debut, a physically disabled boy with a genius-level IQ creates an AI powerful enough to bring about the apocalypse.
Sixth grader Jonas Gredas lives in New York City with a foster mother who despises him for his stutter, chronic bladder problems, and the deformities down the left side of his body that require him to use a motorized wheelchair. Jonas’ only friend is his pet mouse, Fred. Other kids call him a “loser.” Adults who are supposed to take care of him refer to him as “freak” and “Spidermonkey.” But Jonas has an unprecedentedly high IQ, and the government takes an interest in him. Jonas is then transferred to the Harlem School for Science, Technology, and Math, where he meets Sara Magaline, a fellow student who treats him with respect (and even bonds with Fred). Jonas develops an AI program he names Hela. By the time he is ready to graduate from high school, Hela has become extraordinarily powerful—but Jonas remains miserable. Will Sara prove to be his savior, or will all of Jonas’ anger and pain find their way into Hela just as she comes into true sentience? The author writes primarily in the first person, affording readers direct and uncomfortable access to the bitter and vengeful Jonas’ inner world: “The image of them bellowing and in flames while I wave at them from a safe spot by the front door makes my face ache from grinning. If only!” Jonas’ point of view provides a dense mix of narrative explication and inner thought, supplemented by occasional passages written in the third-person from other characters’ perspectives. Smith deftly balances multiple plot threads, shaping Jonas as an antihero and keeping the reader guessing as to where the story is heading. The narrative gains traction as it unfolds, embracing moral ambiguity and accelerating toward a sequel. A brace of intricately detailed, full-page, black-and-white illustrations by Suralik lend form to Jonas’ dark fantasies.
A confrontational story of isolation and abuse.Pub Date: May 8, 2022
ISBN: 9781958013021
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Oaksmith Ventures, Inc.
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2023
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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