An exhilarating tale with an engaging protagonist that will have readers eagerly anticipating sequels.
Survivors on a post-apocalyptic Earth engage in a never-ending war with space aliens in the start of Shors’ (Unbound, 2017, etc.) SF trilogy.
By 2171, humans have been fighting aliens, known as “demons,” for a century. When they first arrived, they killed billions of people, and the only survivors were those who were underground at the time. The aliens made Earth into a prison for alien criminals; the inmates ultimately escaped their confinement and began attacking humans. Inexplicably, the demons also left 11 Orbs of Light scattered around the world and 33 silver staffs. Humans are able to teleport, or “drop,” from Orb to Orb, and the staffs are astonishingly potent weapons against the winged, fanged, and clawed demons. Seventeen-year-old Tasia is a Seeker whose life’s purpose is to kill aliens. She’s skilled with a rifle, but only higher-ranking Guardians are allowed to wield staffs. She blames herself for losing members of her family and other loved ones to demons as well as for her younger brother’s illness from an infection, which happened while he was under her care. To secure necessary medicine for her brother, she journeys to the Arctic Stronghold (one of 11 such structures, each located near an Orb). Drops, however, are unpredictable, and getting from New York City to the Arctic and back could take numerous trips. Her traveling companions include another Seeker named Aki and Draven, a Guardian who writes off Tasia as a coward. Tasia later falls for kindhearted Jerico, a Carrier who collects and transports supplies. Their journey is harrowing thanks to the demons’ swooping assaults. Shors offers a rousing, sharply written series starter. The demons’ attacks are brutal throughout, and it’s difficult for humans to fight against them; in order to kill demons, Seekers must accurately shoot them in the eyes. The Orb drops allow the author to showcase various parts of the future world while maintaining the urgency of Tasia’s search for medicine. Each new destination is a surprise, from the deserts of Risen (formerly the Australian Outback) to the rainforests of Tasia’s home, Angkor (formerly Cambodia). The trips give readers unnerving views of the devastated Earth; even some Strongholds are in ruins or no longer functional. The strongest scenes entail Tasia’s drop experiences; the teleportation disorients her more than other people, and she carries a laminated note as a post-drop reminder of demons’ existence—words of warning that don’t always register immediately. Tasia is a splendid protagonist who makes mistakes and constantly doubts herself but deeply cares for others and, contrary to Draven’s belief, is truly courageous. Other distinctive characters include Aki, who brandishes a samurai sword, and Jerico, whose romance with Tasia is nicely understated. The scenes from a demon’s perspective are surprisingly effective, as when it states a preference for “the flavor of human meat.” Some moments introduce elements of mystery; the demons, for unknown reasons, want the staffs, and Tasia begins hearing a strange voice in her head.
An exhilarating tale with an engaging protagonist that will have readers eagerly anticipating sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9991744-2-5
Page Count: 382
Publisher: John Shors Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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