A frightening novel about an unthinkable future elevated by a very sophisticated protagonist.
In Gagliastro’s dystopian novel, a young nonbinary person fights for survival when the United States is overtaken by a totalitarian government.
Before the advent of the Divided, an oppressive regime that institutes a culture of rape and mandatory sexual slavery, Dime was a smart, perceptive student. Kicked out of the house at age 16 for wearing a dress, he nonetheless got through college and even spent time in France as a translator. But the burden of student loans and low salaries took its toll, and he looked for “sugar daddies” to help financially. Dime identifies as queer and nonbinary but says he can pass for a straight, cisgender male. When the United States is hit with a piece of reactionary legislation called “the Bill,” fascism reigns, resulting in scores of deaths, mainly among LGBTQ+ people and racial minorities. Dime survives as people in this hellish reality are divided into the categories of Minors and Elders, based on age. Minors are poor and middle-class; Elders purchase Minors at auction and keep them as sexual slaves. (“When the Law allows you to do something, more people do it than you would expect.”) Dime has had seven sugar daddies in the past and is now on his third Elder. Minors are executed after serving their third Elder, putting Dime in a precarious position—but a rumor that the West Coast is still free offers a glimmer of hope. Gagliastro’s chilling novel about a nightmarish future pushes right-wing politics to terrifying extremes and tells a raw but perceptive story about the resulting victims. The viciousness of the regime is over the top, and some of the descriptions of violence and degradation are excessive. But the bulk of the novel provides first-person insights into being queer, before and after the revolution, that are razor sharp, timely, and written with a great deal of thought behind them. Dime is in an impossible situation, but he’s a dynamic, enterprising character whose perceptiveness about the world elevates the story to an impressive, convincing level.
A frightening novel about an unthinkable future elevated by a very sophisticated protagonist.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9798218254834
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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