An atmospheric but squishy tale of a thirsty American dictatorship.
Two brothers deal with a totalitarian water emergency in this debut YA sci-fi eco-fantasy.
In a near future of permanent worldwide drought, Oregon has had no rain for a year and suffers drastic shortages of water and food. After the disappearance of their mother, Margaret, a poet, and father, Richard, a scientist working on cloud seeding, 18-year-old Thomas Banks and his 9-year-old brother, Dustin, join the water-patrol, where they hand out tickets for resource-wasting infractions such as failing to recycle urine, growing vegetables indoors, taking baths rather than wiping down with towelettes, and pirating scant renewable electricity. Complicating their duties is Thomas’ girlfriend, Jerusha, whom he can’t bring himself to turn in despite her being a bootlegger with a “water-brewing system” that condenses atmospheric moisture for sale on the black market. For no compelling reason, Thomas, Jerusha, and Dustin set out on a car trip to California through a desiccated landscape scoured by dust storms and brutal water cops. Along the road, they meet a car repairman with information about Richard and join a group of “Leftovers,” misfits who break the rules by digging wells, growing produce, and drinking goat milk. Alas, the police raid their idyllic camp and haul Thomas and Dustin to a “rehabilitation facility” for a baffling (and somewhat tiresome) coercive regimen: They are plied with fresh water and rare delicacies like pizza and orange juice while starving inmates watch; then their food and water are cut off; then a guard threatens to torture Dustin unless Thomas divulges secrets from Richard’s weather research. Zerndt’s dystopian yarn gives a sinister twist to environmental dogmas, making sustainability slogans like “Go Green 4 Life” the rhetorical facade of an Orwellian police state. But like many such novels, this hit-and-miss book suffers from haphazard plotting and an imagined society that makes little sense except to adolescents who think the adult world is nothing but an arbitrary power play. Thomas and Jerusha spend much time on quasi-parental fretting over Dustin’s emotional well-being, which often slows the narrative to a crawl. Still, the author’s prose is well-crafted and evocative—“The hills look like shriveled up nut-sacks, and I can barely see what’s left of the beach with all the dust tornadoeing around”—and her characters are intriguing enough to make readers sympathize with their parched predicament.
An atmospheric but squishy tale of a thirsty American dictatorship.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4782-0915-7
Page Count: 266
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bulky, balky, talky.
In an updated quest for the Holy Grail, the narrative pace remains stuck in slo-mo.
But is the Grail, in fact, holy? Turns out that’s a matter of perspective. If you’re a member of that most secret of clandestine societies, the Priory of Sion, you think yes. But if your heart belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, the Grail is more than just unholy, it’s downright subversive and terrifying. At least, so the story goes in this latest of Brown’s exhaustively researched, underimagined treatise-thrillers (Deception Point, 2001, etc.). When Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon—in Paris to deliver a lecture—has his sleep interrupted at two a.m., it’s to discover that the police suspect he’s a murderer, the victim none other than Jacques Saumière, esteemed curator of the Louvre. The evidence against Langdon could hardly be sketchier, but the cops feel huge pressure to make an arrest. And besides, they don’t particularly like Americans. Aided by the murdered man’s granddaughter, Langdon flees the flics to trudge the Grail-path along with pretty, persuasive Sophie, who’s driven by her own need to find answers. The game now afoot amounts to a scavenger hunt for the scholarly, clues supplied by the late curator, whose intent was to enlighten Sophie and bedevil her enemies. It’s not all that easy to identify these enemies. Are they emissaries from the Vatican, bent on foiling the Grail-seekers? From Opus Dei, the wayward, deeply conservative Catholic offshoot bent on foiling everybody? Or any one of a number of freelancers bent on a multifaceted array of private agendas? For that matter, what exactly is the Priory of Sion? What does it have to do with Leonardo? With Mary Magdalene? With (gulp) Walt Disney? By the time Sophie and Langdon reach home base, everything—well, at least more than enough—has been revealed.
Bulky, balky, talky.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50420-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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