An intense and deeply insightful exploration of the consequences of armed conflict.
This first installment of Barker’s series chronicles the lives of several people in and around near-future Seattle, all caught up in the violent chaos of America’s second civil war.
Rachel Waterman—aka “the Raven”—was an operative for the Western Coalition (a group of states that want to secede) when she was captured by U.S. forces and sent to a detention facility, where she was subject to horrific abuse before she found a way to escape. Now she’s wanted as a war criminal and has a near-mythical reputation as a killer. U.S. Marine Chet Miller, whose friend Rachel killed during her escape, is filled with rage and volunteers to head a mission to track down and execute her—but with a possible ceasefire looming, he only has a few days to finish the job. Meanwhile, Rachel hides out at a remote Western Coalition outpost called Camp FUBAR, which is ingeniously rebuilding a democratic society, one broken soul at a time. Barker’s provocative work is as thematically powerful—and as gruesome—as such war-fiction classics as Jerzy Kosiński’s novel The Painted Bird (1965) and Tim O’Brien’s story collection The Things They Carried (1990), and some readers may find some images unforgettable: “It’s a burnt Jackson Pollock painting of limbs and bricks and blood. Blackened shreds of the flyers are floating down like a twisted snowfall. The white powdery air is suffocating. The smell of singed paper and charred flesh is too much.” The brutal feeling of authenticity, the all-too-believable premise of a second civil war premise, and the intricate plot are all exceptional elements, but it’s the depth and beauty of Barker’s writing that makes Rachel’s and Chet’s storylines so compelling. For example, when the trauma-scarred Rachel enters a store in FUBAR that refurbishes old clothes, she describes it in a way that could apply not only to her community, but also to an American ideal: “This place—a lot of ill-fitting pieces from many different garments—somehow makes a beautiful patchwork quilt. And I am one of those pieces.”
An intense and deeply insightful exploration of the consequences of armed conflict.Pub Date: June 26, 2026
ISBN: 9798995713821
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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