A complex, technological sci-fi novel, served up at a frenetic pace.
Teens in the near future must protect powerful crystals from ancient foes in Pellitteri’s sci-fi debut.
Seventeen-year-old Michael Saxon lines up an internship at a business called Enbright right out of high school. The company began as an environmentally friendly business, and once employed Michael’s scientist parents, who vanished when he turned 7. When Damien Von Conner, the son of West, the company’s founder, took the reins, Enbright expanded into many new fields, including high-tech military equipment. Michael now uses his spelunking skills for Enbright to look for historical artifacts that predate PowerSpice, a fungus found in caves and used for energy. It turns out that there’s a much stronger source of energy, in the form of four apple-sized crystals, which Enbright apparently wants to keep secret. Michael and his teenage co-worker, Emma, don’t know who to trust, as they discover that two rival ancient civilizations, the Draculesti and the Danesti, will resort to kidnapping and murder to retrieve the crystals. Pellitteri’s novel offers a lot to digest, but it hits the ground running and generates impressive forward momentum. The fact that each crystal is located in a different region allows for an expedition of global proportions; along the way, Michael and Emma gradually pursue an unsurprising but pleasant romantic relationship. Readers quickly learn that there’s something special about Michael, although the story doesn’t provide details until the end. Many plot points, such as the Draculesti’s “blood doping” and Enbright’s use of cyborgs, initially seem like asides, but pay off before the story’s over. The author doesn’t squander narrative space: Discussions of flying machines known as Dragonhunters serve as a precursor to an inevitable action scene, and when Michael’s dad tells his young son that a crystal has the power to teleport human beings, it’s not long before there’s a demonstration. Despite the hefty plot, however, Pellitteri focuses on a comparatively small number of characters, and generally represents large groups with one or two people, such as West and Damien at Enbright. Murky associations are a big part of the fun, as characters claim to support one side but actually work for another.
A complex, technological sci-fi novel, served up at a frenetic pace.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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