by Eli Horowitz ; Matthew Derby ; Kevin Moffett ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 10, 2014
An intriguing but less propulsive entry in an unusually robust year for linguistic thrillers.
The world reels with shock and dismay when an entire generation of children is born without the ability to create or comprehend language.
It should be interesting to see how this strange dystopian voyage, composed by a talented triptych of writers, is interpreted by readers who don’t know its innovative origins. This is the analog version of a reportedly addictive digital application of the same name that originally published one story a day; it takes the form of an oral history of the first 30 years of a modern plague that leaves otherwise normal children without the ability to speak, read or write. Clearly borrowing heavily from Max Brooks’ World War Z, this semi-anthology doesn’t include one of the original app’s more interesting features: location-based field reports that could only be activated at certain GPS locations. That being the case, one might expect to find a tighter, more cohesive plotline; but the rambling, episodic and extremely brief natures of its dated entries make it hard to become absorbed in its narrative arc. The first half is very much social commentary, with the linguistic nonconformity of the “silents” standing in for the growing ranks of children with autism and highlighting the well-worn bigotry that emerges around those who are different (dubbed here “mutetards” by the ignorant). Many of the early stories are less compelling—the parents who wish so dearly to have the “normal” children they were expecting; teachers who struggle to reach students who can understand math or art but not their instructions; and the scientists delving into the mysterious origins of the illness. It’s not until forces start to shape the silent generation that the novel gets very interesting indeed. We learn that the children are evolving their own forms of nonlinguistic communication at the same time scientists start using neural implants to “cure” the silent, who may not be so eager to play along.
An intriguing but less propulsive entry in an unusually robust year for linguistic thrillers.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-53447-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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by Chris Adrian ; Eli Horowitz
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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