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COLLAPSED WORLD

RECOVERY

An apocalypse for deep thinkers.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
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This post-apocalyptic debut chronicles the life of John Robertson as he and his allies try to prevent the Dark Ages’ return.

In 2018, on the night of the Super Bowl, civilization changes irrevocably. News outlets report that a genetically engineered biological weapon has begun spreading throughout the Russian Federation, with a nearly 100 percent mortality rate. Soon, air travel is suspended, and nations attempt to secure their borders. Within a few hours of the outbreak, a million people have died. After the president of the U.S. declares martial law, John Robertson, a geographic database manager for a Texas petroleum company, watches the country spiral into chaos. By the time the virus hits the States, it has mutated, allowing one in 10 victims to survive. John lives, while his friends do not. This harsh new world (which lacks government structure, not to mention the Internet) calls for a mission, so John decides to combat the fires plaguing the brushlands of Texas. Eventually, he joins the Texas Military Forces, who embrace his ethos of “saving the savable.” As the years pass, the New Texas Republic proves the most resilient portion of post-collapse North America. But stability brings with it the return of politics and disputes over how to improve the future. Debut author Nobit, in his cool, collected narrative, hopes to fix the world with ideas and compassion rather than Mad Max–style action. Some major problems facing humanity include maintaining food production and manufacturing centers and taming newly barbaric and unorganized territories. In this light, “Machine tools, and those who could run them, became worth their weight in pre-collapse gold.” When John founds the Institute for Security and Justice—an NGO determined to help stabilize areas around Texas—the winning complexity of Nobit’s world ratchets upward. The dirty Sen. Stetson, an isolationist working against John throughout their careers, is central to one of many well-threaded subplots. The tale’s foremost hiccup is that its hero frequently shows “all the emotions of a rock.”  Readers won’t mind much, because grand ideas (like environmentalism and monetary reform) pick up John’s slack.

An apocalypse for deep thinkers.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher

Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

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