A thrilling, well-crafted spy novel.
In the near future, the war against terror is far from over, and nobody's sure who's fighting whom.
The near-future setting of MacLeod’s latest (Learning the World, 2005, etc.) is grimly familiar: a constant drip of foreign terror atrocities mixed with the occasional shock of an attack on the West, with the permanent drumbeat of war in the background. Not long after antiwar activist Roisin Travis films a cargo plane at a U.S. airbase in Scotland unloading a strange-looking device, the entire base is annihilated in what looks to be a nuclear blast. As follow-up attacks flare up, the inconvenient witness Roisin (along with her father, who is spying for the French) makes a run for it from the “interrogation”-happy security services. Meanwhile, government agents wage a protracted campaign of online disinformation about the attacks, trying to obscure the actual reasons behind them—not that they know what those are. All the while, the titular Execution Channel is available 24 hours per day, showing everything from a captured GI being butchered in Waziristan to the stoning of a Nigerian adulteress. MacLeod nimbly melds a tech- and culture-savvy appreciation of what the blogosphere might look like in a few short years with some old-fashioned spycraft. It's a frighteningly familiar world, where electronically-distributed information is easily distorted. In the end, reality seems just so much code.
A thrilling, well-crafted spy novel.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-765-31332-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
A love letter to imagination, adventure, the written word, and the power of many kinds of love.
An independent young girl finds a blue door in a field and glimpses another world, nudging her onto a path of discovery, destiny, empowerment, and love.
Set at the turn of the 20th century, Harrow's debut novel centers on January Scaller, who grows up under the watchful eye of the wealthy Cornelius Locke, who employs her father, Julian, to travel the globe in search of odd objects and valuable treasures to pad his collection, housed in a sprawling Vermont mansion. January appears to have a charmed childhood but is stifled by the high-society old boy’s club of Mr. Locke and his friends, who treat her as a curiosity—a mixed-race girl with a precocious streak, forced into elaborate outfits and docile behavior for the annual society gatherings. When she's 17, her father seemingly disappears, and January finds a book that will change her life forever. With her motley crew of allies—Samuel, the grocer’s son; Jane, the Kenyan woman sent by Julian to be January’s companion; and Bad, her faithful dog—January embarks on an adventure that will lead her to discover secrets about Mr. Locke, the world and its hidden doorways, and her own family. Harrow employs the image of the door (“Sometimes I feel there are doors lurking in the creases of every sentence, with periods for knobs and verbs for hinges”) as well as the metaphor (a “geometry of absence”) to great effect. Similes and vivid imagery adorn nearly every page like glittering garlands. While some stereotypes are present, such as the depiction of East African women as pantherlike, the book has a diverse cast of characters and a strong woman lead. This portal fantasy doesn’t shy away from racism, classism, and sexism, which helps it succeed as an interesting story.
A love letter to imagination, adventure, the written word, and the power of many kinds of love.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-42199-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Redhook/Orbit
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.
Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness.
In her fourth novel, Mandel (The Lola Quartet, 2012, etc.) moves away from the literary thriller form of her previous books but keeps much of the intrigue. The story concerns the before and after of a catastrophic virus called the Georgia Flu that wipes out most of the world’s population. On one side of the timeline are the survivors, mainly a traveling troupe of musicians and actors and a stationary group stuck for years in an airport. On the other is a professional actor, who dies in the opening pages while performing King Lear, his ex-wives and his oldest friend, glimpsed in flashbacks. There’s also the man—a paparazzo-turned-paramedic—who runs to the stage from the audience to try to revive him, a Samaritan role he will play again in later years. Mandel is effectively spare in her depiction of both the tough hand-to-mouth existence of a devastated world and the almost unchallenged life of the celebrity—think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion. The intrigue arises when the troupe is threatened by a cult and breaks into disparate offshoots struggling toward a common haven. Woven through these little odysseys, and cunningly linking the cushy past and the perilous present, is a figure called the Prophet. Indeed, Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet while providing numerous strong moments, as when one of the last planes lands at the airport and seals its doors in self-imposed quarantine, standing for days on the tarmac as those outside try not to ponder the nightmare within. Another strand of that web is a well-traveled copy of a sci-fi graphic novel drawn by the actor’s first wife, depicting a space station seeking a new home after aliens take over Earth—a different sort of artist also pondering man’s fate and future.
Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35330-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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