A richly detailed futuristic premise, crackling battle scenes, and a gender twist march alongside a tried-and-true combat...
In this first installment of an interconnected-world series, a disgraced business executive in the treacherous future seeks to earn redemption by joining a commando outfit on a perilous mission to save humanity.
Debut author Oberon’s high-powered entry in an incipient Earth 340K (Soldier X) series imagines the planet in the year 339,999 as an environmentally devastated, simmering battleground between more than a dozen competing empires. There exists a somewhat matriarchal (but no less violent for it) overarching society in which, as far as this stand-alone’s female protagonist is concerned, Hindu culture predominates. Saradi Anantadevi-Alfsson, a hard-charging executive of the elite classes, jockeys for influence and escalating pay bonuses in an aerospace multinational that has a vital contract to produce rare spaceship-building ore for the “Greatest Scientist,” a 9-year-old girl. The prodigy/messiah’s scheme—taking select Earth colonists to distant, habitable worlds that she’s discovered—remains humanity’s best gamble for survival. Saradi’s ruthless business dealings to satisfy the Greatest Scientist cause a handful of deaths, forfeiture of her job and high-tech luxury lifestyle, and estrangement from her troubled family and fragile daughter. Her only chance for redemption: joining the Austro-Asian military’s commando teams in a near-suicidal raid into enemy territory, where Saradi’s soldier-brother (and, readers learn in a first-act shocker, secret incestuous lover) disappeared. Fortunately, Saradi’s top-level aesthetic body “upgrades” grant her physical prowess that gives the one-time boardroom shark a chance to persevere alongside roughneck warriors many times her size. This boot-camp narrative of suffering and salvation is familiar stuff, and the initially hateful heroine’s transformation into a tough-but-compassionate GI Jane becomes a little pat. But the story satisfies in a hard-combat sci-fi context, bristling with exotic battle gear and weaponry. One might guess Oberon to be a fan of Japanese sci-fi animation like the Gundam Wing series. The similarities include not only the Asia-Pacific settings and occasional insinuation of “mech” robot fighters, but also Saradi’s resemblance to the genre trope of a “tsundere,” a ferocious and beautiful alpha mean girl with a secretly vulnerable emotional core.
A richly detailed futuristic premise, crackling battle scenes, and a gender twist march alongside a tried-and-true combat sci-fi formula.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 304
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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