A tedious dive into an unexpected solution to animal control.
In Guess’ novel, a Russian veterinarian tries to solve the stray dog problem in a small town by creating a new species of canine that can walk upright and talk.
In 2018, Nicholas Krylov, a Russian American professor and expert in city planning, visits Yekaterinburg, Russia—also known as Catherine Town—to help them improve their municipal services as they prepare to host the World Cup Games. Meanwhile, veterinarian Ivan Krastov and his assistant, Dmitry Simovich, patrol the streets at night to capture homeless dogs that roam the city in packs and sometimes attack people. Krastov selects the smartest of these animals to use in secret experiments; he’s developing a new species that could soon be “patrolling streets and performing security functions.” Fyodor, a former stray dog that Krastov has successfully trained, can now talk and stand on his hind legs, and he becomes the veterinarian’s closest confidant. As Krastov gets closer to perfecting a new version of man’s best friend, animal rights groups and his own colleagues threaten to derail his work. The plot deals with exciting topics, including secret scientific experiments and anti-government subversion. However, the novel as a whole is surprisingly slow-paced, with characters that feel underdeveloped. The descriptions of women, in particular, tend to focus on their bodies; a minor character is said to be “muscular, not fat, but large-boned and wore a black dress, which was unflattering yet somehow extravagant.” Anna, a faculty member at the local university, is described as having “a well-shaped body” with “nuanced muscles” and “curvy, dimpled thighs.” However, her relationship with Krylov is only sketchily defined, which makes it unbelievable when Anna’s husband is knocked out while hiking with she and Krylov and they take the opportunity to have sex—during a lightning storm. There are many references to the Soviet era, and the novel seems to be aiming to make a statement about Russian civil service under Soviet rule, but the uneven writing undermines this goal.
A tedious dive into an unexpected solution to animal control.Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64990-325-9
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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