A fascinating and brilliantly confusing journey that ultimately ends, as is appropriate, in illumination. Rereads will be...
Like Billy Pilgrim from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Hurley’s protagonist, Dietz, becomes “unstuck in time,” bouncing from battle to battle in this brutal futuristic exploration into the meaninglessness of war and the legacies of corporate greed.
This book is full of such deliberate cultural references, beginning with the title’s allusion to the famously doomed charge during the Crimean War. Here, it’s also a nickname for the soldiers of the Corporate Corps who have a bad reaction to their deployments via teleportation, ending up not quite where—or when—they expected to go. Despite being neglected or abused by the corporations that run the devastated Earth, Dietz joined the corps (and unwittingly, the Light Brigade) in the war against Mars after that planet’s independent settlers apparently made millions of people disappear from São Paolo, all of Dietz’s family among them. When called to active duty, Dietz (gender unspecified for most of the book, but you’ll figure it out fairly soon) experiences missions out of sequence with linear time, losing and regaining comrades, ordered to perform morally dubious actions which don’t seem to lead to victory, and gradually collecting information that strongly suggests that the enemy is not whom Dietz was told it was. Does the war have an end? Is the future predetermined? Is Dietz trapped in a fixed but fractured loop of existence, or is there a means of escape? As always, Hurley (Apocalypse Nyx, 2018, etc.) is plausibly unflinching about the damage inflicted by the power hungry on those they delegate to carry out their schemes, but thankfully, she doesn’t leave her readers in utter despair, either.
A fascinating and brilliantly confusing journey that ultimately ends, as is appropriate, in illumination. Rereads will be both necessary and desirable.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-4796-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Then comes the fire storm and "It is so short and jumbled and jangled" . . . because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre but it is precise jumble and jangle, disconcerting and ultimately devastating.
Pub Date: March 21, 1969
ISBN: 0385312083
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1969
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IN THE NEWS
A smart and knotty merger of horror, fantasy, and realism.
A tragedy thrusts a mourning father into peculiar, otherworldly corners of New York City.
When Apollo and Emma have their baby, Brian, it feels like both reward and challenge for the new dad. Apollo, the son of a single mother, had been scraping by as a bookseller who hunts estate and garage sales for rare first editions, so even the unusual circumstance of Brian's birth (in a stalled subway train) seems like a blessing, as does the way Apollo stumbles across a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird (inscribed by Harper Lee to Truman Capote, no less) shortly after. But after some young-parent squabbles and inexplicable images on their smartphones foreshadow trouble, the story turns nightmarish: Apollo finds himself tied up and beaten by Emma, then forced to listen to the sounds of Brian’s murder. LaValle has a knack for blending social realism with genre tropes (The Ballad of Black Tom, 2012, etc.), and this blend of horror story and fatherhood fable is surprising and admirably controlled. Though the plot is labyrinthine, it ultimately connects that first edition (“It’s just a story about a good father, right?”), Emma’s motivations, and the fate of their son, with enough room to contemplate everyday racism, the perils of personal technology, and the bookselling business as well. Built on brief, punchy chapters, the novel frames Apollo’s travels as a New York adventure tale, taking him from the basements of the Bronx to a small island in the East River that’s become a haven for misfit families to a seemingly sleepy neighborhood in Queens that’s the center of the story’s malevolence. But though the narrative takes Apollo to “magical places, where the rules of the world are different,” he’s fully absorbed the notion that fairy tales are manifestations of our deepest real-world anxieties. In that regard, LaValle has successfully delivered a tale of wonder and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be a parent.
A smart and knotty merger of horror, fantasy, and realism.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9594-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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