Astonishing, brutal, and beautifully constructed, with a powerful emotional punch; an exceptionally accomplished debut.
This debut contemporary fantasy cleverly blends Chinese and First Nations folklore with a famous Child Ballad into a tale about one young woman/magical tiger’s journey toward accepting herself and averting an apocalypse.
After her tiger father died in a mysterious car crash, Tamara Lin fell more heavily under the dark influence of his sister, Aunt Tigress, who only reluctantly accepted her exodus from China to Canada. Cut off from her familiar sources of magic, Aunt Tigress has always been determined to seize power from the First Nations supernatural forces, however resistant they are to giving it up. After her unwitting complicity in one such conflict, Tam literally cut all ties with her aunt, severing their mystical bond with scissors, and has tried to behave as much like a human as she can. But now, Tam is being menaced by a mysterious creature, and Aunt Tigress has apparently been murdered. If she is to discover the true nature of what threatens her, Tam will have to embrace the more mystical and violent aspects of her being and potentially threaten her budding relationship with Janet, a human classmate who has a link to Tam’s troubled history with her aunt. The person with a terrible past who’s trying to redeem themself is a common trope. Such characters typically cope by being cold and/or stoic, or by making an effortful attempt at kindness and serenity. Here, the protagonist’s attempts to smother her dreadful guilt and bloody impulses result in anxiety and shyness. Tam thinks she wants to be invisible, but the world—and her essential self—won’t let her do it. The result is a more interesting and far more genuine individual; the stakes for Tam’s integrity and love life seem far more fraught, and the violent acts that occur are more deeply felt. The mix of cultures and mythologies in this novel is truly unique, and the reader is also left to wonder until nearly the very end if Tam and her family really are physical tigers who can assume something like a human form, or whether something more metaphysical is involved.
Astonishing, brutal, and beautifully constructed, with a powerful emotional punch; an exceptionally accomplished debut.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780756419387
Page Count: 432
Publisher: DAW
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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