A rambling, overlong portrait of a country torn apart.
A dystopian thriller that foretells a dark future for America.
Miles’ debut novel constructs a world in which the United States, overtaken by a violent regime, has been divided into Areas where society is strictly stratified by class and race. The saga focuses on Area Thirty-Eight, the remnants of what was once Colorado, where Bella and Sullivan Stone, two of the masterminds behind the new system, reside with their enigmatic adult children and hold onto power with the help of the brutal People-Protection Agency they founded. The Stone family includes Caspian, the brutal hand that routinely doles out capital punishment at areawide Gatherings, who’s a well-known scourge to the people; his mysterious siblings, however, stay out of this harsh limelight. Jax, a miller in the laboring class, tries to survive the senseless violence while keeping his bullheaded adopted brother, Kip, in check; however, after the discovery of a metal box in his home filled with books (forbidden objects whose ownership is punishable by death), his position becomes untenable. The narrative flips carelessly between different perspectives and timelines, introducing new characters and history with little context. The two main timelines, involving Area Thirty-Eight at some unspecified point in the far future, and Boston in the past of 2036, slowly overlap to provide readers with a vague understanding of intertwined families and political history. However, it’s full of lingering gaps and questions. Miles’ narrative does have a clear political perspective, describing the outgrowth of the dystopia from the late 2010s onward and lamenting the state of society regarding gun control, abortion rights, and police brutality. However, it doesn’t mention any real-life political figures barring a mention of President Barack Obama’s third term and allusions to Christine Pelosi continuing a short-lived political lineage. The Area Thirty-Eight chapters record Jax’s unexpected involvement with plans to end the Stones’ reign. Still, the characters often feel unrealized, offering clumsy portraits of trauma and PTSD in a narrative that only reinforces the bleak violence of their daily lives. The plot often takes nonsensical turns, as well, possibly due to underdeveloped worldbuilding.
A rambling, overlong portrait of a country torn apart.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-578-28565-8
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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