by Jeff Bauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 4, 2014
A powerful examination of the dog-human relationship.
Emma is surprised to find an intelligent friend in her new dog, Sadie.
After Emma’s beloved family dog dies, she doesn’t think she wants another. But when her mother brings home Sadie, a precocious Chihuahua, Emma can’t help but get attached. With her mother lost in her work and her brother constantly holed up in his room playing violent video games (her father is her only ally at home), Emma finds it easy to lose herself in Sadie, especially once she realizes Sadie is highly intelligent. Sadie progresses quickly in her lessons, moving from listening to Emma’s explanations to learning to sound out words in her own language to mastering written and other forms of expression. Plus, Emma finds there is much Sadie can teach her, with her superior sense of smell and understanding of the natural world. Beyond her home life, Emma is preparing for high school graduation, thinking about sharing an apartment with her best friend and finding a boyfriend, but Sadie’s arrival changes her life in ways she couldn’t anticipate. While it seems like an awful lot of random events occur, most are based on the family dynamics laid out in the first few chapters, making for a tightly executed plot. Despite the light premise, this is a heavy book: human issues like death and mental illness feature prominently, as do more canine-specific issues like dog fighting, puppy mills, and shelter life. The narrative focuses a lot of attention on the work done in shelters to help animals, clearly a concern of author Bauer (Wakulla Bones, 2013, etc.), who dedicates the book to pets and mentions the Tallahassee Animal Service Center. Sadie’s story also brings up broader issues, like the roles dogs play in the lives of people, what they need from humans, and how far humanity has come from its more animal instincts. There’s a frustrating lack of wonder about why Sadie is the way she is, although this question does come into play later in the story. Characters fill important roles but are mostly flat, falling into good and bad categories easily assessed by their smells. Nevertheless, the well-paced story brings up interesting dog food for thought.
A powerful examination of the dog-human relationship.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494274252
Page Count: 322
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Ken Liu ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2014
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.
Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.
Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Joel Martinsen
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