A lavish historical epic that balances details and emotional impact.
This series opener follows various Pleistocene hominids as they struggle for survival.
In East Africa, 850,000 years ago, Xhosa is a female Homo erectus who enjoys the physicality of hunting and fighting. Her father, who desires peace, is the People’s Leader. Her mother was killed in front of her by one of the vicious Big Heads (Homo sapiens), who want complete control over any territory they find. When her father is likewise killed by Big Heads, Xhosa competes with Nightshade, whom she may mate with, to become the new Leader. Further encounters with the Big Heads bring Xhosa into contact with the handsome Wind, one of two brothers leading the savages. While his brother, Thunder, is remorseless, Wind is willing to talk and reveals a reverence for Xhosa. Meanwhile, in southern Africa, Pan-do (Homo erectus) and his People have been traveling for over a month. They also flee Big Head violence and hope to find a place to settle down, possibly alongside the gentle Homo habilis Uprights. Lyta, Pan-do’s daughter, walks lamely yet is attuned to nature and the realm of the mind in ways unheard of to the People. Her dreams may be the key to uniting disparate clans and finding true safety. Beginning a new trilogy, Murray (Born in a Treacherous Time, 2018, etc.) continues to chronicle how humanity spread across the globe from an origin point in Africa. While taking dramatic liberty with the notion of speech (as readers know it), the author presents characters who face the hard choices that have plagued heroes throughout storytelling’s history. Despite the truth that “the more aggressive, the longer life lasted,” Xhosa knows that the People can’t survive on war alone. Art, dreams, and empathy are bedrock components of society; they also advance the narrative in fabulous ways, including tying Xhosa to famed human ancestor Lucy. The clear message that humanity should live in harmony with nature rather than endlessly consuming and expanding should resonate more than ever with modern audiences.
A lavish historical epic that balances details and emotional impact.Pub Date: March 6, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Structured Learning LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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