Greenfeld has a tendency to lean toward parody in his satiric style, but here he employs enough authenticity to terrify,...
In a near future where the poor have been utterly undermined by the rich, a renegade emerges to champion the inherent good in people.
After mocking urban gentrification in his debut novel (Triburbia, 2012), here Greenfeld employs the ethos of the Occupy movement in imagining how the worst tendencies of conservative power and economic greed might wreak havoc on a nation. The novel opens on a squatter’s camp in California, where “Subprimes” with ruined credit ratings wander fruitlessly looking for food and shelter. We meet Sargam, a motorcycle-riding orphan whose kindness is blinding. Blessed by one young family for giving them a little money, she says, “Not God. It’s just people. People helping people. That’s all we got.” Greenfeld pulls back the curtain on his slow apocalypse to reveal an America where roads, education, and the justice system have been privatized, with public services and schools left to crumble. In an eerie sidebar, the poisoned environment is driving whales to beach themselves in mass numbers. Greenfeld alternates his third-person narrative with a first-person perspective on current events from Richie Schwab, one of LA’s last journalists, who copes by smoking potent weed and working his beat. Schwab falls in with Gemma Mack, the beleaguered wife of Arthur Mack, a hedge fund manager who famously swindled billions from his clients. Arthur is now in cahoots with “Pastor Roger,” the leader of a megachurch who empowers industrialists and oil barons in the name of God—seriously, the villains here make the most single-minded Objectivists look like saints by comparison. Sargam and her tribe make their way to rural Nevada, where the Subprimes occupy a housing development and begin building a fair, equitable, and sustainable community dubbed Valence. Naturally, the bad guys learn there’s fracking energy to be had beneath Valence, and the fight is on. Ain’t no justice, just us.
Greenfeld has a tendency to lean toward parody in his satiric style, but here he employs enough authenticity to terrify, enough black humor to disarm the story's inherent pessimism, and a surprising admiration for faith in its myriad forms.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-213242-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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