With so many questions left unanswered, this dystopia is ripe for a sequel.
Growing up among privileged doomsday preppers, Marlo has always known that the end of the world was nigh. But she never suspected trouble from within her community.
Climate change, poisoned soil, rising sea levels—the harbingers of ecological collapse prompted Marlo, her adoptive parents, and a group of wealthy, like-minded survivalists to settle a secluded community in the wilds of Oregon. Adopted at 14 months old, Marlo has grown up on the ranch, with only occasional visits to the outside world, a place known as the Disaster among the ranchers. Now 25, Marlo has few friends left now that Alex and Ben have moved out. With sporadic access to the internet, Marlo doesn't get many updates from them about their adventures in eco-activism. But the sleepy wait for an apocalypse abruptly ends when five bald eagles are discovered dead on the ranch with no clear cause of death. Curious about life in the Disaster and restless to participate in the fight against climate change, Marlo makes plans to temporarily leave the ranch. But her overprotective, smothering parents have other ideas. Serendipitously, a mysterious stranger arrives at the ranch. His name is Wolf, and he may be the answer to at least some of Marlo's prayers, as they quickly connect and fall in love. In this, her debut novel, Sloley masterfully weaves together the tropes of dystopia, romance, and mystery. Suspicions and questions abound: Is Wolf too good to be true? Who is posting ominous religious quotations around the community? Who hid the mysterious gun cache? Yet as alarming events compound, the rising sense of menace is undercut by Marlo’s naiveté. Her sheltered life and overdependence on her parents prevent her from seeing the dangers that the reader sees at every corner.
With so many questions left unanswered, this dystopia is ripe for a sequel.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0406-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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