A gritty, hopeful narrative with emotionally rich characters.
In Caldwell’s dystopian thriller, a conscripted worker with a gift for “binding”—feeling the emotions of those around her—attempts to escape her authoritarian society.
In the Atlantic States of America, the people are governed via a corporate-run caste system, with a handful of companies profiting from their labor. Conscripted workers are clad in pale blue and microchipped, and Shepherd officers police them with cruelty and electric “zap-crooks.” When 23-year-old Ruby Roth’s boss Colin Tate’s betrayal leads her into a dangerous situation involving a disturbed Shepherd and a housing eviction, Ruby’s connections in the monastic Elohi Order help her and her neighbors, Harold Sr. and his son, Little Harold, escape the oppressive regime. The Elohi Order helps by “serving others in order to ease or prevent suffering,” and they have extensive connections to aid migrants at the Atlantic States’ border with the United West. In that country, Kaileh Clearwater Lewis searches for answers regarding her brother’s death while defending her egalitarian community as a Warrior. Ruby and Kaileh’s twisting journeys merge after a groundbreaking revelation transcends artificial barriers. This fast-paced, tense story expands on a traditional border-crossing narrative by presenting two women traveling toward each other, unaware of their connection. The third-person perspective alternates between these two well-drawn characters, and readers will especially root for Ruby’s success. Her binding ability evokes additional empathy for her character, as it results in painful encounters: “agony shoots into her, radiates from her belly like an exploding star.” The grim landscape of the Atlantic States of America is engagingly visual, with one corporation controlling farms and housing, and the fact that societal strata are identifiable by color is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s classic The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). And despite the darkness, a throughline of hope runs through this ultimately inspiring story of perseverance and resistance.
A gritty, hopeful narrative with emotionally rich characters.Pub Date: June 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780986190711
Page Count: 412
Publisher: GC
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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