A compelling, thrilling SF yarn.
A young woman has to relearn how to survive and thrive after being cured of a deadly, zombielike virus in Ramsay’s novel.
CeCe Campbell wakes up confused and in pain, with her father, Shawn, by her side. The last thing she remembers is celebrating her 18th birthday with her friends; her father drops the bombshell that two years have passed since then. CeCe has been infected with the Kill Virus, which essentially makes people into zombielike creatures. Shawn managed to find a cure, and CeCe was his first priority. After months of healing and therapy, CeCe is ready to leave the makeshift hospital that has been set up to rehab the recently Cured. This means she has to face the devastated outside world, which is very different from what she remembers. Trying to return to some semblance of normalcy, CeCe starts taking GED classes at the recently reopened school, but even that is a rough go; there is another student, Olivia, who is part of a religious cult that sees the virus as God’s plan to eradicate the evil people on Earth and hates the Cured. But there is a bright spot in CeCe’s life: Derrick, another person who has beaten the virus and is finding his way in the world. While CeCe enjoys spending time with him, she has a secret—she knows Derrick is the one who infected her, but how can she tell him and burden him with guilt? In this speculative tale, Ramsay delivers a narrative that is darker than its title may suggest. The virus-decimated landscape (“storefront windows busted out, puddles of dried blood on the sidewalks, smoke billowing in the distance, and the abandoned houses on her street”) highlights the author’s skill at worldbuilding; physical descriptions of the characters may be few and far between, but each is distinct in attitude and action. The story, coming in at around 160 pages, moves briskly—readers will be entranced the whole way through.
A compelling, thrilling SF yarn.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781957295824
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Boroughs Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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