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
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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