Intelligent, action-packed, and emotionally charged.
A resurrected cancer patient must fight for her right to exist in this speculative fiction debut.
Shortly after Alabine Rivers falls in love with Max Green, she discovers she has lymphoma. Her oncologist is initially optimistic, but when it becomes clear that Alabine is going to die at age 23, she and Max start fundraising for her only remaining option: cryogenics. The plan is for CryoLabs to preserve and maintain Alabine’s body until science finds a way to cure her and bring her back—hopefully no more than a few decades from now. It comes as a surprise, then, when Alabine regains consciousness a century later in an abandoned cryo clinic swarming with armed soldiers. Rebels dubbed Resurrectionists spirit Alabine away and reveal that the eastern half of the former U.S. is now United America, a fiercely nationalistic, aggressively anti-technology country that forbids the revivification of cryogenically preserved humans despite the fact that there are millions. Upon arriving at a Chicago refugee camp full of fellow “Awoken,” Alabine learns that resurrection was actually legal for quite some time thanks to a campaign waged by Max and centered on her. The U.A.’s president intends to soon destroy a large Atlanta cryo facility and its contents, effectively committing genocide, so the Resurrectionists woke Alabine to help sway public opinion. Alabine protests—until the rebels disclose that Max is also frozen, and they plan to liberate and resuscitate him, as well. Howes thoughtfully extrapolates from current events to create a chilling, all-too-plausible future. Vividly sketched, deeply sympathetic characters and high-stakes, adrenaline-fueled plotting propel the tale to a cathartic close.
Intelligent, action-packed, and emotionally charged.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-59318-5-285
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
A ghost story, a love story, a mystery—this seductive novel has it all.
A haunted house full of haunted people is the setting for this lively, moving tale.
When 15-year-old Sana Malek and her widowed father move from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Durban in 2014, they land in a once-glorious mansion overlooking the sea, now a ramshackle rooming house presided over by a kindly old man called Doctor. Sana is familiar with ghosts, having been haunted all her life by the spiteful ghost of her previously conjoined twin sister, who died soon after they were separated. So she recognizes that the house teems with them. She forms tentative bonds with some of the place’s corporeal residents, a group of contentious older women. But she’s more interested in the departed, and she begins to unravel their stories, especially when she finds a long-locked bedroom with diaries and photos that are evidence of a couple in love. In 1919, we learn in the book’s second timeline, a dashing, wealthy young Muslim man named Akbar Ali Khan left his village in Gujarat. Eventually he settled in Durban, following an arranged marriage in India with his modern Anglophile wife, Jahanara Begum. They have a son and daughter, but their marriage never warms, despite the spectacular house and gardens he builds for them. Then he does fall in love, with a Tamil girl hired to work in his sugar factory. Meena rejects him, but he takes her as another wife anyway, patiently winning her over until their love catches fire. Akbar isn’t the only one in love with Meena; the djinn of the title, an ancient creature weary of the world, is enchanted. But Jahanara’s bitter jealousy of Meena will lead them all to a terrible fate. Almost a century later, Sana will put it all together—but will that bring catastrophe? Khan’s prose is lush and lovely, her pacing skillful, and she successfully weaves a complex plot with a large cast.
A ghost story, a love story, a mystery—this seductive novel has it all.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593653456
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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