A clever and finely wrought steampunk tale about aliens and misfits.
Źymbalist tells the story of two Martian girls attempting to get home in this debut steampunk novel.
In 1903, in three towns in Maine, three misfits’ lives are about to intersect. There is Emmylou, a young, clubfooted Martian girl who had been visiting Maine with her aunt only to have the woman fly away in their rocket ship, stranding Emmylou and her sister among the suspicious residents of Blue Hill (“What if the villagers somehow recognized them?” Emmylou muses. “If someone had noticed the rocket ship, then the villagers would be out and about looking for Martians”). There is Giacomo Venable, the self-published author of Sir Pilgarlic Guthrie’s Phantasy Retrospectacle and, in some ways, a self-loathing failure. There is Rory Slocum, a young boy who gets grief for always having his head in books, dreaming of life on Mars. Struggling to escape from the pressures of their respective situations, the characters drift forward in parallel threads, even as they move toward the ultimate goal of trying to help Emmylou and her sister escape the prejudicial society of Earth and return safely home. In the background is the constant, haunting song of the otherworldly Oceanides, the mysterious and maligned sea nymphs whose voices can be heard by only those that they have targeted for madness. Źymbalist writes in a lovely, highly descriptive prose that luxuriates in the details and curios of his setting: “The brimstone moths would be fluttering all about the command hub, each one fiddling with the many buttons and electrodes by which to work the technology of anti-matter propulsion...all of them nibbling on gowns of Martian mohair and felted wool.” The plot hits all the requisite steampunk notes—flying machines, Pinkertons, H.G. Wells—even if the pacing is lackadaisical. Though epic in structure (over 750 pages), the novel turns out to be ultimately reserved in its ambitions. It never fully delivers on the space-opera flourishes mentioned in the first chapter (Martian vulcanology, Venutian conquest); most of the book takes place in a Maine only marginally more exotic than the real state. That said, the world Źymbalist creates is so rich and vast that, for a certain type of reader, 750 pages will not be nearly enough.
A clever and finely wrought steampunk tale about aliens and misfits.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5232-1403-7
Page Count: 764
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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