A readable and elaborate, if somewhat didactic, novel about a man finding his true destiny on a faraway planet.
A complex SF yarn about death and regeneration.
At the beginning of Stadtmiller’s novel, Hurricane Logan is heading toward a bar called Rosalie’s and its environs, prompting talk of evacuation. The potential weather emergency is the furthest thing from young teacher and part-time bartender Darren Abington’s mind at the moment, though, as he’s worried about whether his wife Mary’s cancer is in full remission and, if it is, whether they want to try to have a baby together. So at first, he doesn’t pay much attention to the high-spirited group of storm chasers at his bar—until later, when it increasingly seems as if they’re drawn to him personally. But as the storm blows and night falls, the plot takes a hard turn: Darren wakes up on another world. The planet is Pryeana, a rocky world that’s far, far from Earth and has, for mysterious reasons, been the destination of humans for many years—specifically, redheaded humans who’ve recently died on Earth. The natives of Pryeana refer to these additions as “Alfreds”; they only comprise a small fraction of Pryeana’s 2 billion people, but their appearance has sparked a planetary interest in biological regeneration technology. The offspring of Alfreds and regenerated people are called Surge Omegas, a rising power demographic on Pryeana. Darren learns all of this with a certain amount of impatience since he’s mainly concerned with his wife and whether she’s on this new world. From this sudden and unpromisingly expositional shift, Stadtmiller steadily develops an intriguing world—and its long connection with Darren and his family. Too much of this elaboration is simply told to Darren (and the reader) at the expense of more edge-of-your-seat drama, but the worldbuilding in these pages is satisfyingly detailed. Darren himself remains a frustratingly one-note character throughout; the story, too, has a certain stiffness that’s characteristic of allegories. Fortunately, however, Pryeana gradually comes to feel like a very real place, and the high-stakes story that develops there will please readers with its mounting tension.
A readable and elaborate, if somewhat didactic, novel about a man finding his true destiny on a faraway planet.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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