A strong series finale that celebrates the growth of both individuals and societies.
An imminent cosmic threat forces battling factions of humanity to wage war on two fronts in this third installment of an SF trilogy.
It is 2093, and the survivors of the asteroid called Jurbay that destroyed half of the United States exist as “The 28 United.” In the city of Ash, their leader, Avery DeTornada, has formed a truce with the army of The Third, led by a man called Raghill. Avery believes in combining forces and preparing for war against another army led by Chapman, her 10-year-old son, who is a half genetically engineered being. But Avery’s most trusted friends, Morris and Annalynn, believe that tackling another threat should take precedence. Five years ago, a second asteroid was discovered heading for Earth. This menace, named Jurbay’s Baby, must be dragged or blown off course within three years, otherwise the survivors’ monumental struggles will be for naught. Complicating Avery’s goals is Degnan, the wily operator of the Dark Market and creator of weapons capable of changing humanity’s fate. While Avery feels compelled to fight for her husband, McGinty; and their infant son, Justice, she must tread a dark moral landscape. Thankfully, her colleagues have superseded her authority in preparing for the asteroid. Yet the manipulative Chapman is willing to force Avery into bloody terrestrial warfare. Mansfield’s finale deftly addresses how relationships evolve over time and under extreme duress. When Annalynn and Raghill, who grew up together, begin working closely on curtailing the asteroid, new emotions overtake them. Only Avery’s chapters are first person yet the prose never fails to instill the “ticking of the world’s clock” in readers. Combining this warning with mentions of natural beauty (“We venture...into the midst of multiple groves of hemlock trees”), the book echoes the present-day call for urgent action on climate change. Some of the conceptual play from prior volumes persists in the “repwas,” creatures that are a blend of reptiles and wasps. While many of the emotional turns are grim, the powerful narrative offers quiet hope with Avery’s line, “We may always disagree about our methods, but I trust you to...[s]eek a world of words and not weapons.”
A strong series finale that celebrates the growth of both individuals and societies.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 9798848982282
Page Count: 404
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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 philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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