An intriguing and thrilling SF novel about a woman’s journey to, and new life on, Mars.
In Lomax and Bramlett’s SF novel, a journey to Mars leads to much more than anyone could have dreamed.
On Earth, in 2172, Leighton and her family are just making do in Miami Island. With her parents gone, Leighton and her sisters have moved in with her uncle, Marshal, who keeps them all busy with money making schemes. He sees Leighton as his next chance at a big score, and after Marshal drugs her, she wakes up in a facility, tied down, with her legs in stirrups. The doctors determine that Leighton is pregnant and she is packed up with the other women to board a ship. Not only is Leighton being forced to carry and sell a child—she’s being taken off-world to Earth’s colony on Mars. As much as Leighton tries to keep herself separate from the life growing inside her, the bigger her belly gets, the harder it is to ignore. And when the baby is born, its appearance—so different from her own and its father’s—is a shock (“she sees a tiny arm with blue fingers waving in the air, slick with wetness and an odd mass of white hair”). Soon after her release from the medical facility, Leighton connects with Leo, a security worker she saw on the journey to Mars. He helps her get a job on his next transport ship and things look like they might settle down. But life has other plans for them both: Marshal isn’t going to just give up on the money Leighton made on the sale of her baby, and Leo discovers something hidden on the planet that no one could have foreseen. The first book in a new series, this novel is a fast-paced read that will keep readers guessing. There are several month-long time-jumps in this novel that feel strangely placed, as significant events occur during these jumps that readers only find out about later. The characters lack some depth, but this is due to the authors’ focus on the plot rather than poor writing—readers will be eager to follow the story and get to know them better.
An intriguing and thrilling SF novel about a woman’s journey to, and new life on, Mars.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798877987654
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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