Readers of the Bloodright Trilogy will enjoy this second installment, despite its leisurely pace, and they'll be left eager...
In this sequel to Bonds of Brass (2020), Gal wrestles with his love for Ettian, the boy who took on an empire to save him, and his new role as Ettian’s prisoner.
Narrated by Gal from his gilded cage on Archon’s capital planet, and then from inside Archon's dreadnought flagship in the middle of a war with his mother’s empire, the Umber bloodright heir has no idea how to feel about anything. He blames his former roommate and lover for his imprisonment. Then again, Ettian saved his life by taking his throne. But Ettian lied! But so did Gal….All Gal really knows is he’s currently Ettian’s human shield and the best hope the young emperor has of staying alive once Gal's mother brings the full fury of the Umber fleet down on Ettian's newly crowned head. Meanwhile, Gal’s schemes to regain freedom and his own crown dig him deeper into danger when Ettian takes his advice and goes to the front, dragging Gal and their friend Wen—who is known as Archon’s new Flame Knight—with him. Gal soon realizes that if he wants to keep his and Wen’s heads away from Archon general Iral’s ax, Ettian needs to remain in power. And Gal, with all his training and knowledge of true empire, is Ettian’s best chance. With so many outcomes leading to death for one or all of them, Gal walks a fine line threaded with panic, post-traumatic stress, and lessons in controlling what you can instead of obsessing over what you can’t. Skrutskie strives for a fresh look at the lover-to-hater-and-back-again trope, taking quite a few unexpected detours among her diverse and sprawling worlds. This installment maintains quite a slow burn between all the recaps of the first volume and the necessarily slow machinations of a war in space fought with mileslong ships, but the last third of the book does return to the fast-paced, intimate action many readers came to love in Bonds of Brass. Above all, it’s a character study of Gal, whose struggle with panic attacks and PTSD are very real and well done, though he’s often hard to like when he’s being a selfish, obtuse know-it-all.
Readers of the Bloodright Trilogy will enjoy this second installment, despite its leisurely pace, and they'll be left eager for Book 3.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-12892-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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