A gripping story featuring well-constructed characters, poignant moral dilemmas and a chillingly realistic dystopian future.
In Erickson’s (Eagle: Birds of Flight, 2013) dystopian sci-fi novel, a cryogenically frozen scientist wakes up in the year 2155 to find that he’s the only man in a matriarchal military state.
In 2019, Lt. Jose Melendez is a scientist on the autism spectrum who uses himself as a test subject in his innovative cryogenics research. When a sudden, unrelated pandemic causes nearly all adult men on Earth to become violent, Melendez is one of the few who are unaffected, and he soon becomes the subject of military testing. His work in cryogenics takes on a new urgency as it may hold the key to keeping mankind alive. He’s frozen as part of an eight-month cryogenics test, but he isn’t thawed until more than 150 years later. His rescuers are four cybernetic “artificial persons” who have been expelled from society for exercising free will. In this future world’s matriarchal society, all male youths are similarly “cast out” of society when they reach puberty. Melendez and the APs learn that the government is actually murdering the boys, despite the long-ago eradication of the original pandemic, so they form a guerrilla-style group to try to stop the killings. Meanwhile, Maj. Mare Singh tries to stay focused on her military career, but secretly spends all of her free time watching, through mirrored glass, the young son she was forced to give up. When she discovers that Melendez has implanted a computer virus into all APs, she soon learns of the murders, and she comes up with a plan of her own to save her son and the other boys. In this first, two-part installment of a planned series of novellas, Erickson artfully raises profound ethical and philosophical questions regarding class systems, gender equality, neurodiversity and what it means to be human. He draws on classical references, and especially literature, in his work, and readers will likely appreciate the way he beautifully weaves in references to Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells and other masters of science fiction. Overall, it’s dystopian literature at its finest.
A gripping story featuring well-constructed characters, poignant moral dilemmas and a chillingly realistic dystopian future.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1478704188
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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