A violent alien occupation/prison break novel that feels more retro than futurist.
After an alien invasion, a resistance fighter makes an uneasy secret alliance with one of the creatures prior to becoming a prize prisoner in Chambers’ debut YA SF novel.
In the future, humankind is laid low by climate change, with cities becoming walled fortresses against floods and resources and infrastructure depleted. Sinister aliens called the Fringeants are undertaking a stealthy takeover of Earth, occupying major population centers and killing many residents. Fringeants look mostly human except for their glowing eyes and mouths, and their weapons tend to be whips, fists, and bows and arrows. They also use totemic magic involving the use of doll-like “poppets.” Somewhere in Canada, Feng is an underground fighter/saboteur/medic who fled pursuit by Fringeants as a teen three years ago. When Feng takes shelter in a Fringeant-held house, he accidentally makes his first close contact with one of the creatures. Diem is a sort of healer among the invaders and an expert wielder of poppets; she repeats the official line that Fringeants have a moral imperative to conquer the ecologically abused planet and force barbaric human beings into following the Fringeants’ universal religion and become enlightened. After Feng is captured and suffers brutally under torture, Diem reconsiders her peoples’ agenda and ethics. Chambers’ debut is not the satire its title seems to portend; instead, the graphic material in this work brings to mind the splatterpunk aesthetic. Descriptions of physical harm abound in these pages, and the fact that the Fringeants are resolutely low-tech for a galaxy-traveling race—their POW compound lacks even rudimentary surveillance—puts the material in league with brutal war stories of yore. However, quite young adults largely comprise the ensemble here instead of adults; the author herself was in her teens when the yarn was written.Readers may appreciate the many twists and betrayals in the close-quarter setting of a disused school that serves as a Fringeant base. An open ending indicates troop transports of sequels are on their way, and a preview of a prequel is included.
A violent alien occupation/prison break novel that feels more retro than futurist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-9990214-6-7
Page Count: 431
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The fictional universe Solomon constructs here is inadequate to the real-world issues they are exploring.
A Lambda Award–winning writer explores America’s dark history of brutalizing Black bodies in their latest work of speculative fiction.
Vern is a young woman raising her twin babies in a forest, dressing them in the hides of animals she’s hunted and hiding them away in makeshift shelters. Vern is being followed by ghosts and stalked by someone who butchers animals and dresses them in infants’ clothes. Both are connected to the Black separatist commune from which Vern has escaped. As a parasite takes over her body, Vern develops superhuman powers and begins to suspect that she is a test subject being used by the United States government. There’s a lot going on here—perhaps too much. The novel starts out strong; the portion of the narrative in which Vern and her children are fending for themselves in the wilderness has the feel of folklore, and the idea that she is haunted by the experience of her ancestors is evocative. As Solomon moves further into the realms of science fiction, though, their voice loses much of its force. This is surprising given the quality of the worldbuilding in An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), a dystopian tale set on a giant spaceship. The problem isn’t that the notion that Vern is part of a secret experiment conducted on Black people is implausible—Solomon references both the Tuskegee Study and the work of James Marion Sims, a 19th-century gynecologist who practiced new techniques on enslaved women. The problem is that the concept that drives the plot for half the novel is barely developed. With almost no evidence, Vern intuits that she is part of a shocking conspiracy, and, from that point, readers are supposed to take this as a given. Instead of building a compelling case, Solomon wrestles fantastic tropes into shapes that fit the frame they’ve created without effectively supporting it.
The fictional universe Solomon constructs here is inadequate to the real-world issues they are exploring.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-26677-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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