In Blake’s time-skipping novel, a Shakespearean actor from the past ends up at the modern Globe Theatre.
In 1613 London, Jon Henry has set the theatrical world alight with his convincing performance of Anne Boleyn in his friend William Shakespeare’s latest play. Unfortunately, the Globe Theatre is literally set alight during a performance, and the entire building burns to the ground. Still wearing his Anne Boleyn dress—his street clothes were destroyed by the flames—Jon joins some of the other King’s Men for a drink. After imbibing some strange potables, Jon drunkenly ends up in the Thames, where he climbs into a floating barrel of freezing brine and sinks to the bottom of the river. He spends four centuries entombed in the concrete foundation of a quay until he’s dislodged by a dredger. The actor, who’s been cryogenically preserved,floats to the surface and awakens in a nearby hospital, confused. He soon realizes that he’s in the 21st century: “Will was gone….everyone Jon had ever known were dead and had been dead for so long, not even their bones remained.” At a loss, he hits the London streets, searching for something familiar. Luckily, he soon meets Emma Morgan, a performer at the modern Globe Theatre, and she has a generous heart. It turns out the Globe is about to begin production on Henry VIII—a play that Jon knows very well, though by its alternate name, All Is True.Can Jon fit in among modern people who would never believe him if he told them his true story? And is Emma, a fine actor herself, hiding secrets of her own?
Blake’s love of Shakespeare is apparent on every page of this book, and fans of the Bard of Avon will surely recognize numerous clever allusions to the plays; when Jon is unconscious in the hospital, for instance, his nickname among the staff is “Ophelia,” as he was found dressed as a woman while floating in the water. However, Blake’s tendency to cater to Shakespeare fandom often has the effect of taking the reader out of the story, as when the novel clumsily introduces the playwright into the narrative: “ ‘William Shakespeare at your service,’ he said with a swooping bow that revealed his balding pate.” Later, when Jon tells Shakespeare that his plays will be read for centuries, the man responds in a manner that shows far too much foresight: “For everything there is a season. The English language is growing, vowel sounds are changing, and some day people will not understand my rhymes and puns.” The modern-day material is a bit more fun: Emma has just played Viola and Cesario in Twelfth Night, and she and Jon both make use of disguise during the story. Unfortunately, the novel never really escapes the Shakespearean framework to find its own reason for being. Bardolators will enjoy keeping track of all of the references, but these won’t likely be enough to sustain the interest of general readers.
A neatly executed but somewhat thin tale that revolves around classic plays.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9858081-9-8
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Morgan Online Media
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION | TIME TRAVEL
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
84
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A haunting fable of a lonely, moribund world that is entirely too plausible.
92
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Nobelist Ishiguro returns to familiar dystopian ground with this provocative look at a disturbing near future.
Klara is an AF, or “Artificial Friend,” of a slightly older model than the current production run; she can’t do the perfect acrobatics of the newer B3 line, and she is in constant need of recharging owing to “solar absorption problems,” so much so that “after four continuous days of Pollution,” she recounts, “I could feel myself weakening.” She’s uncommonly intelligent, and even as she goes unsold in the store where she’s on display, she takes in the details of every human visitor. When a teenager named Josie picks her out, to the dismay of her mother, whose stern gaze “never softened or wavered,” Klara has the opportunity to learn a new grammar of portentous meaning: Josie is gravely ill, the Mother deeply depressed by the earlier death of her other daughter. Klara has never been outside, and when the Mother takes her to see a waterfall, Josie being too ill to go along, she asks the Mother about that death, only to be told, “It’s not your business to be curious.” It becomes clear that Klara is not just an AF; she’s being groomed to be a surrogate daughter in the event that Josie, too, dies. Much of Ishiguro’s tale is veiled: We’re never quite sure why Josie is so ill, the consequence, it seems, of genetic editing, or why the world has become such a grim place. It’s clear, though, that it’s a future where the rich, as ever, enjoy every privilege and where children are marshaled into forced social interactions where the entertainment is to abuse androids. Working territory familiar to readers of Brian Aldiss—and Carlo Collodi, for that matter—Ishiguro delivers a story, very much of a piece with his Never Let Me Go, that is told in hushed tones, one in which Klara’s heart, if she had one, is destined to be broken and artificial humans are revealed to be far better than the real thing.
A haunting fable of a lonely, moribund world that is entirely too plausible.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31817-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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