Dull characters, bland dialogue and thin plotting make for a weak final installment of the trilogy, which Birmingham closes...
The final novel in Birmingham’s post-apocalyptic trilogy (After America, 2010, etc.) doesn’t wrap up the story so much as coast to a stop, with a frustrating amount of padding before the disappointing climax.
After a mysterious energy field known as the Wave destroys almost all human life in North America, the world is plunged into chaos, as foreign political powers are destabilized and the remaining Americans struggle to rebuild their country. Past its initial (entirely unexplained) premise, Birmingham’s series is more action thriller than science fiction, and this final installment focuses primarily on four point-of-view characters: Caitlin Monroe, a ruthless covert agent sent to infiltrate the rebellious, totalitarian Texas government; Sofia Pieraro, a hardened Mexican teen out to avenge her father’s murder; Jed Culver, chief of staff to the U.S. president; and Julianne Balwyn, a British smuggler on the run from a hit squad. Most of the action this time around takes place in the reconstituted United States, which is just getting back to a semblance of stability several years after the Wave. After having established various new political realities, Birmingham does little of note with them, and whole areas of the world remain barely mentioned. Instead Birmingham slowly and tediously draws connections among the various characters’ missions, filling many chapters with meandering exposition and irrelevant details. On several occasions he devotes substantial passages to exploring the backgrounds and points of view of characters who are then immediately killed or otherwise taken out of the story. Readers who’ve followed the trilogy from the start may be invested in the characters’ personal vendettas, but they’re disappointingly hollow compared to the largely ignored geopolitics of the changed world.
Dull characters, bland dialogue and thin plotting make for a weak final installment of the trilogy, which Birmingham closes by awkwardly setting up a potential sequel. No thanks.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-345-50293-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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
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
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