Winsome, sweet, and apocalyptic—a perfect blend for the end of days.
Amber Kivinen is going to Mars! She just has to win a game show first.
Amber and Kevin Watkins have known each other since second grade and have been going out since they were 17. When they left their hometown of Thunder Bay, Ontario, to move to Vancouver, it was supposed to be for brighter horizons—an escape from their oppressive home lives and a chance to pursue their dreams. Ten years later, those dreams seem to have stalled out. Kevin’s ambition to be a screenwriter only lasted one semester in film school, and in spite of her master’s degree in environmental science, Amber is working as a receptionist. To supplement their incomes Amber and Kevin also run a small-scale hydroponic marijuana farm out of their basement apartment and, inevitably, partake fairly heavily of their product. For Kevin this life seems an ideal fit; he is perfectly content to go nowhere as long as he and Amber are “going nowhere together.” Amber, however, who was on track to become an Olympic gymnast before a shoulder injury sidelined her, has nowhere to channel the energy that propelled her to athletic greatness except into a cycle of self-destructive flirtations. That is, until she hears about the MarsNow mission and the attendant game show, a “Survivor-meets-Star-Trek amalgam,” in which the two winners—one man and one woman—will receive one-way tickets to Mars as the first Marsonauts in billionaire tech guru Geoff Task’s settlement. Seemingly against all odds, Amber is chosen to appear on the show; then, as 12 grueling weeks of challenges winnow down the competitors, it becomes a real possibility that she might win, leaving Earth, and Kevin, behind forever. Part disaffected-slacker rom-com, part social satire, part wistful end-of-the-world eulogy for ordinary, unscripted love, this novel veers close to the kind of wearying cynicism and late-stage capitalist master-villainy that would make its conceit feel familiar. Yet again and again the novel saves itself from this fate by the very real hope at the heart of its main characters’ binary orbit around each other—that love may be enough after all; if not to save them, then at least to make sure they will not be forgotten.
Winsome, sweet, and apocalyptic—a perfect blend for the end of days.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9780393285918
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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