This environmental tale delivers a vital message but few surprises.
A Christmas Carol meets An Inconvenient Truth in this novel.
Jake Krimmer, an ambitious Washington, D.C., businessman in his late 30s, has made a career profiting from catastrophes. As a dealer of Financial Transmission Rights, Krimmer and his team predict when areas will suffer power shortages and buy surplus electricity from elsewhere on the grid. The intellect behind the operation is his lovely assistant, Samantha Roberts, an exceptional meteorologist and young mother with an incredible knack for predicting disasters and a hidden hold on Krimmer’s affections. He suppresses any misgivings about the source of his wealth by dismissing the wild atmospheric conditions as “weird weather.” This outlook is abruptly challenged when a mysterious, alluring stranger named Rita Ten Grieve requests that he engage in a game to see if she can change his mind about the reality of climate change and the ethics of his business. She begins by accessing the private conversations of those closest to him, revealing that even his personal connections believe in human-made climate change. She then escalates her efforts by showing him virtual reality scenes of the future of the nation’s capital: the Jefferson Memorial battered by waves; the National Mall covered in FEMA trailers; the White House collapsed under a sinkhole. Her intent, she explains, is to reveal the “terror of the ordinary”—the reality of the near future. Hallberg (The Piketty Problem or The Robots Are Coming, the Robot Are Coming, 2017, etc.) begins the novel with a strong satirical bent and ends it with a sense of real urgency. The pictures of what humanity’s future will look like if climate change is not addressed are sobering and successfully invoke a call to action. Likewise, the economic and scientific information is well researched and realistically portrayed, if occasionally dense. But the plot suffers from an excess of predictability, both in regard to Rita’s game and Krimmer’s romantic journey. As Krimmer’s attitude softens into self-awareness, the writing loses some of its incisive snap. And the ending is ultimately a little too neat to be truly satisfying.
This environmental tale delivers a vital message but few surprises.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 282
Publisher: The Reason for Everything, LLC
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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